A review by dessuarez
Remains by Daryll Delgado

dark emotional

5.0

This might now be my favorite Filipino novel written in English simply because it hits home more than anything else.

Like literally. Spatially. Tacloban, where this story is set, is the closest to my hometown that a contemporary Filipino novel has ever come. Four hours from Hilongos, we drove there two days after Yolanda to rescue my Auntie and her two kids who came to live in our house - with no electricity or water - for months to come; I saw the town before and after the storm, and I heard about it from and I saw its effects in my loved ones for years after. This is a vivid story. 

In no other story have I had images form as quickly in my head. I did not need to imagine the place, the people, and milieu, I found them as easily as I would have recalled a memory. The way that it is written, with the interview transcripts bearing the actual Waray text for instance, the casual code switching between English and Waray which is exactly how we talk around these parts, and the narrator's compulsion to evoking every smell, only made it even more clear in my head, I can genuinely say it's like I'm actually there, because for a brief, harrowing time, I really was.

And to further my affinity with this book, it is narrated by a UP student, a former activist, and a social worker, roles I have previously played; Even her attitude towards charity and foreigners, to trauma and her own mother is all too familiar to me. And she is a woman, written by a woman, which is very important to me personally, because my experience with the local industry is that it's still very macho, and it's important to me that in fiction Filipino women are represented in a nuanced way which only a Filipino woman herself could ever describe.

This narrator reminds me a lot of one of Caroline Hau's narrators in Tiempo Muerto, and also of Nick Joquin's narrator in Cave and Shadows. They are amateur detectives, in a way,  who have come back to their hometown to solve a mystery -- either someone is missing or someone has been murdered or both -- and in the end, the mystery is never solved, the questions never answered. Because the point of these postcolonial murder mysteries is not to solve the mystery, but to discover the conditions which led to a tragedy. I think Daryll did a great job executing that in this book. There is much to chew on at the end, it stays with you, that's what these kinds of books are precisely for.

Having learned that this book was nominated for the National Book Award on the same year that Tiempo Muerto was, I found even more reason to compare the two. They both talk about contemporary issues while "smuggling" (in quotations because these conditions are directly linked to the contemporary issue in question) Martial Law subplots. I really like that about these two. I realized that the only reason I prefer this book over Hau's is because it's in Tacloban, and I've been there, it's close to me, while Hau's Iloilo is not somewhere I am familiar with yet.

It's interesting how space factors into that cognitive process. I'm confident that the same story told in a different town will yield a different experience, because this is not a homogenous nation; I want more books that would illustrate that. I want the literary industry in this country to produce and distribute more books from the regions. And by God I'm gonna try to move that needle in whatever way I can!!!

I'm so glad that I read this. I'm going to read it again as soon as I'm able.