Pagpag: The Dictator’s Aftermath in the Diaspora
EILEEN R. TABIOS
Stories
“Martial law is a historical trauma that has no national boundaries, a trauma carried by generations, one that affects the memories and consciousness of Filipinos in the Philippines and in the diaspora.”
—Nerissa S. Balce
ISBN: 9781732302549
LCCN: 2020930702
Cover Art: Rea Lynn de Guzman
Paper | 6x9 | 106 pages
Publication Date: March 16, 2020
List Price: $16 (price may vary by retailer)
Praise
“Eileen’s word ‘pagpag’ has had a colorful history. In a 17th century vocabulario, ‘pagpag’ means to manually brush off dust from one’s clothes. Later, those who come from funerals practice pagpag by going on side trips to evade bad spirits and avoid nightmares. Those in covert operations master the pagpag art of taking sharp curves to trick possible stalkers. More recently, garbage pickers do pagpag by shaking off dirt from their scavenged food before feasting on leftover meal. But in Tabios’ craft, Pagpagnot only shakes but shocks. Her fiction, which is actually poetry in friction, has a sharpness that slits the dictator’s sly tactics in ‘rebranding’ family image. Pagpag also slaps our cheeks to prevent us from becoming numb to mediatized murders in society. To what, then, can I compare the impact of Eileen Tabios’ Pagpag? Jesus says, “If people will not listen to you, shake the dust off your feet as a testimony against them”. I think that’s it! That’s it!”
—Albert E. Alejo, SJ, author of Sanayan Lang ang Pagpatay (Killing is a Matter of Practice) and Ehemplo: Spirituality of Shared Integrity in Philippine Church and Society
“I was intrigued by the title because I study Filipino and Filipino diasporic culture that deals with the afterlife, or the cultural legacies, of the Marcos dictatorship. Eileen Tabios uses the term “aftermath” in her subtitle, which suggests temporality, in particular the consequences that follow a ruinous or traumatic event. And for some Filipino immigrants, the Marcos dictatorship or the martial law era was traumatic. The trauma of authoritarianism is the open wound of Filipino life, an event that witnessed the migration of Filipino families to the U.S. and the exportation of Filipino migrant labor around the world. Martial law is a historical trauma that has no national boundaries, a trauma carried by generations, one that affects the memories and consciousness of Filipinos in the Philippines and in the diaspora.”
—Nerissa S. Balce, author of Body Parts of Empire: Visual Abjection, Filipino Images and the American Archive
“PAGPAG is a joy to read because it makes us laugh, for if there is one thing I remember about being an activist during Martial Law, …it is that we used laughter. We mocked those in power, and drawing from Mikhail Bakhtin’s discussion of the carnivalesque, this laughter was necessary in the “de-crowning” of the dictator. Moreover, the book also reminded me of family and friends who managed to joke even during dark times, of political work made lighter by shared laughter, and how, amidst fear of detention, we made up funny songs…”
—Joi Barrios, author of To Be A Woman is to Live at a Time of War
“…PAGPAG gives us a glimpse of not only of where we came up short, but also why today too many lessons are learned the hard way. In one of Pagpag’s pieces, Eileen Tabios points in the story “A Ghost Haunting” to one of several reasons why many are wrestling with a deep sense of unarticulated anomie: “The optimism in my memory is a taste of rust, jarring against what I observed the country had become. The optimism is an ache that will not go away. It is a ghost haunting.” // She is describing the Philippines but it can just as well be the United States. Or Brazil. Or India. Think of the fireflies reminding us of the rubble of institutions crumbling from the combined force of neglect and official venality.”
—Renato Redentor Constantino, author of The Poverty of Memory: Essays on History and Empire and Executive Director of the Institute for Climate and Sustainable Cities
“Pagpag is a provocation, connoting both debris and creative refashioning of memory fragments from the Marcos dictatorship—a legacy that, in the words of Philippine nationalist historian Renato Constantino, remains ruefully “a continuing past,” especially in today’s Duterteland. Here, the remains of the regime, like rescued reminiscences of an era preferred forgotten but not lost are gathered anew in a compelling telling, this time from the lens of a diasporic exile. In this volume, Eileen Tabios captures in scintillating prose the sights, smells, sounds, and ghostly hauntings of that era and offers back to the homeland, as in the gift of a proverbial balikbayan box, her reflections both heartfelt and wrenching.”
—S. Lily Mendoza, Executive Director, Center for Babaylan Studies, Associate Professor in Culture and Communication, Oakland University, and author of Between the Homeland and the Diaspora: The Politics of Theorizing Filipino and Filipino American Identities
“In these stories Eileen Tabios explores the ways in which the collective experience of Filipinos echoes through generations, following us even if—or when—we drift worlds away from the archipelago. What is the legacy of government cruelty and greed, of poverty, struggle, unwanted uprooting? In the first story (“Negros”), the abject hunger of an ancestor reaches through time to shape the mind and body of a young boy. In the last story (“On Imitating a Rhinoceros”), a daughter watches helplessly as her old father clings to a wavering belief that leaving his homeland was the right thing to do. I recognize myself and my family in these pieces; I am seen and heard. Moving and necessary, this collection invites the reader to grapple with truths in all their difficult, complex beauty.”
—Veronica Montes, author of Benedicta Takes Wing and Other Stories and The Conquered Sits at the Bus Stop, Waiting
“Pagpag is a Tagalog word I used growing up to dust off a pillow or a blanket. Now it is used to refer to garbage food scavenged, recooked and resold to poor people. In her short story collection, Eileen Tabios uses both contexts to bridge her personal history with Martial Law and add texture to our already failed historical memory. These stories matter to us more than ever, as many Filipinos struggle under the tight grip of another populist, and as many more have forgotten that we have seen this before, and time is eating its own tail. Tabios begins her poignant collection with a “mamau” (ghost) and reminds us the historical past is not a ghost but a reality we carry with us if we can only see it as such.”
—Bino A. Realuyo, author of The Umbrella Country and The Gods We Worship Live Next Door
“In this collection of short fiction, author Eileen Tabios contemplates the terrible distances (emotional as well as physical) imposed on Philippine citizens by the country’s colonial governments and postcolonial dictators, abetted by global capitalism. In protest, the central metaphor of Pagpag, “scavenging through trash heaps for discarded food that the poor then attempt to clean and re-cook for new meals,” speaks to various forms of hunger as well as desire for transformation. Brilliantly weaving comedy, satire and elegy, the stories echo tricksterish folk tales, but with a contemporary, introspective edge. Don’t be fooled by seemingly nostalgic peeks into the Philippines’ archipelagic culture: this book cuts deep into long-held illusions, exposing painful truth.”
—Jean Vengua, author of Prau and CORPOREAL, and editor of Local Nomad
About the Author
Eileen R. Tabios loves books and has released over 70 collections of poetry, fiction, essays, and experimental biographies from publishers in 11 countries and cyberspace. Publications include the long-form novels The Balikbayan Artist and DoveLion: A Fairy Tale for Our Times; the form-based Selected Poems, The In(ter)vention of the Hay(na)ku: Selected Tercets (1996-2019), THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL: Selected Visual Poetry (2001-2019), INVENT(ST)ORY: Selected Catalog Poems & New (1996-2015), and THE THORN ROSARY: Selected Prose Poems & New (1998-2010); the first book-length haybun collection, 147 MILLION ORPHANS (MMXI-MML); a collection of 7-chapter novels, SILK EGG; an experimental autobiography AGAINST MISANTHROPY; as well as two books translated into French and three bilingual and one trilingual editions involving English, Spanish, Thai, and Romanian. Her award-winning body of work includes invention of the hay(na)ku poetic form as well as a first poetry book, Beyond Life Sentences (1998), which received the Philippines’ National Book Award for Poetry (Manila Critics Circle). Her poems have been translated into 11 languages as well as computer-generated hybrid languages, paintings, video, drawings, visual poetry, mixed media collages, Kali martial arts, music, modern dance, sculpture and a sweat shirt. Additionally, she has edited, co-edited or conceptualized 15 anthologies of poetry, fiction and essays as well as exhibited visual art and visual poetry in the United States and Asia.
