Bonetti: Assuming that it is you talking in one of your prose pieces
from Danger and Beauty, you’ve actualy described yourself this way: "I was
born in the Philippines. I am a quintessential bastard. My roots are dubious." Where
does the bastard part come from?
Hagedorn: Well, there’s always a bastard in the family isn’t there?
And certainly with the Spaniards, they left a lot of bastards around. I’m an underdog
person, so I align myself with those who seem to be not considered valuable in polite
society. I think for a lot of so-called post-colonial peoples, there’s a feeling of not
being quite legitimate, of not being pure enough. And to me that’s the beauty and strength
of the culture—that it is mixed.
Bonetti: Can you tell us a little bit about the basic mix of cultures.
In Dogeaters, you refer in one section to eighty dialects and languages spoken.
Hagedorn: There are many, many tribes who speak their own dialect but
who have no say in what’s going on in government, for example. So we have to think about
that too. But people speak Tagalog, which is also known as "Pilipino" now—the
nationalists claim it’s Pilipino. Many speak English, and some of the older generation
still speak a very fluent Spanish, because that was part of the culture at one time, or a
mixture of the three. For example, in my household sometimes a sentence could have all
three languages in it at once. It’s not like sometimes we spoke the whole sentence in
English and other times in Tagalog. No, it was all in the language. Like a
"Tag-lish" or something. And there are many, many more languages. When the
Spanish came over to do their colonizing, these islands with disparate tribes suddenly got
lumped together. And not everybody necessarily got along. There was, according to some
Filipino historians, a matriarchal society which was wiped out. Animism was practiced.
Some of the people are highlanders; some are lowland peoples; some are Muslims because at
some point in our history the Arab traders had come through there, so there is a very
powerful Muslim faction in the southern region of the Philippines.
Bonetti: With all the backgrounds that you’ve said are prominent in
your family, why is it that you identify yourself with the Asian experience?
Hagedorn: Because that’s been my experience.
Bonetti: Even though your father was Spanish?
Hagedorn: Yes, but he was Filipino Spanish. There’s a difference. When
mestizos go to Spain, they are looked down upon. "Ah, you live in the
Philippines." You know, it’s a class thing, even if you’re rich. There’s always this
motherland–fatherland bit, and then there’s the colonies. My identity is linked to my
grandmother, who’s pure Filipino, as pure as you can probably get. And that shaped my
imagination. So that’s how I identify. I also identify as a Latin person, a person who has
Latin blood. Certainly, I’m exploring that now. And I’ve lived now in North America close
to thirty years. In terms of my politics, I feel a political alliance too, with the Asian
community here.
Bonetti: Can you tell us about the concept of "Kundiman"
that you end Dogeaters on?
Hagedorn: The novel ends on an ambiguous, ambivalent note. There’s a
lot of brutality in Dogeaters, and I think that especially with the suffering
that the character Daisy goes through and the loss of the senator and all the other people
who die or are tortured, and just the daily suffering of the poor there, which is
enormous, the Philippines is still a beautiful country and I wanted somehow to convey
that. So I decided originally that the Kundiman section was going to be the grandmother’s
prayer. I mean, actually, that was one of the titles I thought of, The Grandmother
Prays for Her Country. But I thought, "No, I want to even lift it above a
specific character’s voice, and maybe it’s my voice that speaks at the end. But how do I
convey this sort of longing in this prayer, and the rage? There’s a lot of rage in the
prayer." So I decided on the Kundiman because it’s music in a ballad form. It’s very
melancholy music. It’s a love song often sung, it seems to me, in a way or played in a way
as if the love will never be satisfied.
Bonetti: And what tradition does it come out of?
Hagedorn: "Kundiman" is a Filipino word that describes this
music. But I’m pretty sure around the time it became popular there may have been a Spanish
influence on it. We have little orchestras called rondallas and musicians play
this banjo-like instrument called the banduria. When I finally went to Spain, I
found out the Gypsies play it there and the Spanish have claimed it. But actually maybe
the Arabs brought it, the Moors. And so maybe that’s how it came to the Philippines. Who
knows?
Bonetti: How did you come to the shape of this novel, of how you
wanted to present this material? Hagedorn: It pretty much fell into place that
way. It made sense as I was writing it. Whenever, for example, I’d come across a news
clipping that really tickled my imagination I’d say, "Oh God! This really belongs
here!" Rather than try to revise the clipping so that it would read as a narrative, I
thought if it’s a news item, use it as a news item, you know. You can have a novel that is
like a collage, which I feel Dogeaters is. A lot of the ten years thinking about Dogeaters
I worried about the structure. How could the structure also tell that story? A lot of
novels about the Philippines or set in the Philippines don’t cut it at all because they
don’t capture the crazy-quilt atmosphere and the hybrid ambiance that occurs twenty-four
hours a day. Things happening all the time, and noise and crowds and beautiful animals and
amazing flora. At the same time, pollution and urbanization and sophistication and, you
know, the jungle. How do you do all that? You can’t tell it in a traditional way because
the language dies. And also the music of the language itself, the music of the streets.
How do you convey that chaos? So, once I decided to go with it as I found it, I relaxed
because at the risk of alienating some readers, this was the way the novel had to be
presented.
Bonetti: You’ve described the "memory of Manila" as
"the central character of the novel I am writing." How much of the Philippines
of Dogeaters, because you left at the age of fourteen, is the product of memory,
as you’ve implied, and how much is the product of augmented memory and research?
Hagedorn: It’s both. I think it’s very important that it’s memory
first because too much research and factual writing can kill a book. I wasn’t trying to
write the absolute "real deal" story of the Philippines. I was only writing
about a certain time frame and also about a certain group of people in a city, you know.
This is not the quintessential Philippines novel. I mean, I don’t know who’s going to
write that. There are many writers there who have grappled with creating the epic
Philippine novel.
Bonetti: "I am the other, the exile within," you have also
said. Do you think that in some cases, or in your case, it was an advantage to be an
outsider as it were, writing from memory, in order to deal with such a large subject?
Hagedorn: Having distance always helps. It gives you a certain
overview that when you are right up against it, it’s very difficult to make certain
choices.
Bonetti: How did you come to the characters that surely were not a
part of your growing up in Manila at all, such as Joey?
Hagedorn: But they were. I mean I didn’t go to those bars when I was
eight years old, but those people were always there. That’s why the book jumps back and
forth in time. When I was old enough and going back to the Philippines more often, it was
the time of martial law when it was very repressive on the surface. At the same time there
was a lot of corruption, and pornography was part of life even though you had this regime
that was trying to present itself as being squeaky clean. Well, it was the height of the
worst moral decay. I was on my own then, so I could explore what I wanted to explore. And
I already had the idea that one day I was going to write this novel, so I made myself open
to a lot of different experiences and met all kinds of people. I wanted to get to that
underbelly because I felt like those were the people who nobody cared about and nobody
thought about and they were too easily dismissed.
Bonetti: Characters like Domingo Avila, who is assassinated, begs
comparison to Ninoy Aquino. And Santos Tirador, the handsome guerilla, has his equivalent
too. What kind of a challenge was it for you to work in a purely fictive way and yet know
that readers were going to recognize some of these people?
Hagedorn: I hear that it’s a wonderful parlor game back home for
people to go "I know who this is!" It’s funny to me because I really did combine
people. Otherwise, it’s too easy. I thought that Avila was the most difficult because he
was the good guy, and good guys for me are hard to write about without making them saintly
and boring. I tried very hard not to make it too obvious. He’s killed in front of a hotel,
for example, not coming off a plane. Anyway, there are so many people like him. That’s
another reason I did not name the president and the first lady purposely. It wasn’t to be
coy. It was that the Marcoses were symbols. They weren’t the only dictators we’ve ever
had. They just happened to have been around the longest, and they were the most public and
the most celebrated and the most reviled. But there have been many victims, many
assassins, and many political assassinations. You just don’t hear about them because it’s
part and parcel of politics there.
Bonetti: Were you conscious at all of this novel being able, at least
on one level, to be read as a dual coming of age novel? It’s Joey’s coming of age, and
it’s Rio’s coming of age.
Hagedorn: Yes, but I didn’t plan it that way. I’m not a writer who
works off an outline. I don’t do file cards. Some writers know where they’re going when
they sit down to write a novel. I know there are certain things I want to include, but I’m
character-driven and if the characters keep moving and living and growing on me, the story
unfolds. It’s like a puzzle which starts falling into place. But I never know where I’m
going when I start. I knew it was going to open in a movie theater. I knew it was going to
be from this young girl’s point of view. I knew that sometimes the character of Rio, the
young girl, would speak in the first person and sometimes she wouldn’t, but I didn’t plan
for the character of Joey to be the only other character who speaks in the first person.
Actually someone had to point that out to me. They said, "Oh, you have the two
narrators."
Bonetti: What do you think is going to happen to Joey after he finds
himself up there in the mountains? Do you think about your characters that way at all?
Hagedorn: Yeah, I do. But I didn’t want to deal with whether he would
become the good revolutionary or not. I think there’s been so much disillusionment that’s
occurred with the left in the Philippines. And I could see that the point was that Joey is
taught something. Then where he goes from there wasn’t my concern any more. It was going
to be very ambiguous because he could turn into a really awful person once again. This new
knowledge that he has about what’s going on around him doesn’t necessarily mean that he’s
going to become a better person.
Bonetti: It seems that where we leave off with the character of Joey,
in that very ambiguity, you do have fertile ground for questions about the relationship
between the personal and the political. What makes a person become a revolutionary in this
world? There are any number of ways that can happen, and in Joey’s case it was being the
product of a horrifically abused childhood.
Hagedorn: And then the accident of seeing something occur and
realizing he’s been used. But I’m not so sure that he gets to understand it all. That’s
why I wanted to leave it open. I did not want to go the easy way and make him go from
anti-hero to hero.
Bonetti: Is it a uniquely Filipino thing, or just something particular
to him, that Rio’s father is a personof Spanish background living in the Philippines for
several generations and still feels like a visitor, that Spain was still really home? And,
in fact, his mother does still live in Spain.
Hagedorn: His mother lives in Spain, but she’s not a Spaniard either.
Is it a Filipino thing? I don’t know. I really don’t want to generalize like that because
that’s where you start getting in trouble. It’s specific to this character, but there are
many characters like him who are so caught up in the class garbage of feeling that they’re
the colonials in their own country. It’s almost as if the Philippines is a stopping point
and then life will go on once we get to the United States, get our visa and leave. Now,
it’s no longer about going to Spain. That was a particular generation. Now, it’s like
"We’re going to get our visas and split and come to the United States." Because
they have given up on the Philippines, they feel a certain hopelessness and despair, and
they don’t want to stay and try to fight it. They feel it’s a situation that they have no
power to change. Rather than even fighting or voting for someone else or something, they’d
rather leave. So, it’s a comment on that—about living there and always feeling like a
stranger. And maybe that’s a uniquely post-colonial condition.
Bonetti: What do you make of the contrast between Joey and Rio, of how
they both end up not having any control over their lives?
Hagedorn: There are a lot of similarities between the two even though
one came from pure poverty and the other comes from an upper-middle class background and
has access, she thinks, to many other things in the world and to material goods. But even
she has no control on one level. But there is a point where the two of them realize they
might have some control over their lives. They do, in their souls anyway. And she starts
to come to grips with that as the book ends. And he…Who knows? He’s a pragmatist. Joey
is a survivor, that much I’m clear about. Whether he goes back and hustles for the rest of
his life or he really changes. Maybe he gets betrayed again? Because, hey, the left,
they’re not saints either. Or he may end up working for the telephone company. I based the
Daisy character, for example, on a composite of several people, but one of them had been
in the mountains, had fought, had really taken this idea of the revolution very seriously.
But finally, she came down from the mountains, just got burned out and tired of being on
the run. She was one of the most wanted people in the Philippines and by the time I
interviewed her, she was working at a mundane job and seemed to be somewhat at peace with
whatever compromise she had come to. It was completely bizarre because she had been
somewhat of a legend.
Bonetti: People know who she is?
Hagedorn: Yes. Bonetti: And nothing’s happened to her?
Hagedorn: Not anymore, no. She’s not living under an assumed name.
It’s kind of hard to do that in the Philippines. The city itself, you know, they would
know who you were, so she couldn’t do that. So, who knows, Joey could have ended up that
way too.
Bonetti: You’ve written that at one point you scorned yourself and
that it was only later, after you had left the Philippines "to settle in the country
of my oppressor"—which you have also said you never thought of as being the
oppressor back then—"that I learned to confront my demons and reinvent my own
history." First, what are the demons you’re talking about confronting?
Hagedorn: The demons of identity are certainly some of the demons I
confront. God, I don’t have to list all my demons, do I Kay? But in that particular
sentence I meant this sort of condition of who am I? I am of mixed blood. Where are my
allegiances? Is there an easy answer? No there isn’t. I wanted to have clarity about what
I was doing. Who am I as an artist, as a woman? Now whether or not I choose to answer
those questions, I still get disturbed by them. Those themes permeate my work, so that’s
part of the demonology of my life. And I think about issues of mortality and immortality.