Nazi Literature in the Philippines: A Critical Overview
By Jade Mark Capiñanes
“Mocha Uson (not be to be confused with the then PCOO Assistant Secretary and USTAA Awardee for Government Service Mocha Uson) was one of the most influential fictionists of her time. Known for her experimental works, mostly in the form of news articles passed off as factual journalism, she was one of the key literary figures who reinvented not only Philippine literature but also Philippine history. ‘Her interactive, hypertextual stories throw you into a totally different world,’ writer-critic Harry Roque (not to be confused with the then Pestilential [sic] Spokesperson Harry Roque) wrote in the introduction of ‘Libakan: The Journal of Contemporary Philippine Literature.’ ‘You just click that link, and you’re now in a magical world where the blind can see, the cripple can walk, and your average mayor can feel.’
“Her only novel, candidly entitled ‘I’m a Victim of Fake News Too,’ was marketed, in a usual Uson-esque twist, as a memoir. Not only that: the book was, the blurb said, also ‘posthumously published,’ even if Uson herself was present at the book tours, selling and signing copies of her book, definitely not turning in her grave. The anti-novel/anti-memoir/anti-Dilawan sui generis literary work received numerous accolades; the award-giving bodies, however, were all uncertain if the recognition they gave Uson should be considered posthumous too. But one brave critic panned the book, saying, ‘If the book is an honest account of Mocha Uson’s harrowing experience as a victim of fake news, it might as well be an unintentionally excellent case study of Stockholm Syndrome.’ The said critic later became not a victim of fake news but of something else, something very real: a sudden disappearance. The critic vanished so mysteriously that, except for his/her review of Uson’s book and his/her disappearance itself, all information about him/her, even his/her name, were erased from public records and memory.
“Pantaleon ‘Panty’ Alvarez (not to be confused with another Pantaleon ‘Panty’ Alvarez, because there is no other Pantaleon ‘Panty’ Alvarez to be confused with in the first place, because who else wants to have a feminine undergarment as a nickname?) hailed her as ‘the most avant-garde writer of her generation, if not of all generations. She’s so ahead of her time I think she owns a time machine.’ And indeed it was widely believed that Uson owned a time machine: there were even theories that the time machine was hidden somewhere in Malacañang, or perhaps under the then Justice Secretary Vitaliano Aguirre’s toupee. What further fueled the conjectures about Uson’s being a time traveler was the fact that most of the tenses in her prose were inconsistent: her ardent readers argued that it was not because she didn’t hire a proofreader, but it was because she simultaneously lived in the past, the present, and the future.
“It was often remarked that Uson pushed the limits of fiction, or reality, or whatever, too hard it hurt.”
The passages above were taken from one of the only three extant pages of “Nazi Literature in the Philippines” (2018), arguably one of the most intriguing books, albeit now incomplete, in Philippine literary history. The other remaining pages contain: (1) the title, “Nazi Literature in the Philippines,” and the date and place of publication, “2018, somewhere in the Philippines, out of desperation,” which have been generally accepted as true and not part of the running joke; and (2) an epigraph, which is a line from Roberto Bolaño’s “Nazi Literature in the Americas” (1996), which has become a key to understanding the contents of the book in present consideration. Scholars (Reid & Lustre, 2045; Padilla & Bernardo, 2051; Manzano, Locsin, Mercado, Locsin, Mendiola, et al, 2059) speculate that, since it was influenced by Bolaño’s book, the portion about Mocha Uson is only one of the possibly 30–40 pseudo-biographies included in it.
In “Satire and the Filipino Psyche: Can Those Two Concepts Even Exist in the Same Sentence?” (2062), the eminent historian Lodipet Malou Werpa, who was one of the survivors of the historic Philippine Thirty Minutes’ Keyboard War of 2018, ruminates on the role satire played, or failed to play, during the Duterte administration. She writes that “famous personalities, mostly government officials, who were often the subjects of satires at the time simply didn’t have the mental faculty to detect satire, even if they themselves often wound up in circumstances in which they seemed to satirize themselves. They lacked subtlety, a significant element of satire, which was evident in their shameless and blatant abuse of power” (pp. 185–186). It was a surprise, therefore, that the satirical work “Nazi Literature in the Philippines” attracted the attention of such personalities, who then “ordered the seizing and destroying of all its existing copies, printed and digital, and even those that were written on bathroom walls” (p. 201). Pia Ranada’s controversial 2043 autobiography-cum-political treatise, “You Have Already Destroyed My Career, and Now You Want to Destroy My Bathroom Too?,” recounts one of the multitude instances in which the pursuit of the said book went overboard: “I was in the toilet when a wrecking ball suddenly smashed the wall I was facing, but luckily, in a mere split-second, I managed to duck” (p. 1). Ranada, however, did not take into account that the wrecking ball was like a giant pendulum, so the back of her head was hit when the ball swung back. She, nonetheless, “survived and lived to tell the tale” (p. 19). Ressa (2043), in her review of the book, argues that “it has some of the most moving sentences authored by a Filipino, very much unlike any of the ungrounded and vapid sentences you’ll find in the 2018 SEC decision revoking Rappler’s license” (par. 3).
But how did the fragments of the book survive? For several years it was believed that every copy, every page, every word, of that book had been completely destroyed. Moreover, due to relentless propaganda, the book was wiped out from the consciousness of the general public. It can be said that it also achieved the status of an urban myth: some people talked about it from time to time, but they thought of it the way they thought of the duwende, the tikbalang, and the kapre. And then in 2031, according to the classic book “The Septic, the Skeptic, the Schismatic” (2032), hitherto the authority in terms of the history of the discovery of “Nazi Literature in the Philippines,” a septic tank cleaner, “having emerged from the cesspool, accidentally found what looked like a little book, and, curious, called the attention of his client, who was incidentally a historian” (p. 25). They went on to examine the found object, cleaned it with running water, and moments later the words “Nazi Literature in the Philippines” surfaced, upon which the historian, no other than the actor-turned-academic Xander Ford, who also authored the book that details such discovery, in third person, knew that “he had just come across what would give him his biggest break since his plastic surgery, and which would incite skepticism and schism among the intelligentsia” (p. 32). Years later rigorous studies on the found remnants of the book started, and the rest, as they say, is history.
And here’s the latest development in the long-standing pursuit of unlocking the significance of the text. With her signature incendiary style of intellectual scrutiny, Viceral (2068), in her recently published book, “Super Parental Guardians: Nazi Literati in the Philippines,” offers an interesting hypothesis: she argues that “Nazi Literature in the Philippines” is “not so much addressed to Mocha Uson herself as it is to the writers of that period who defended, enabled, and even glorified Uson, her ilk, and what they collectively represented” (p. 7). She writes that “the literary references in the extant passages of the book were used to appeal to the literati themselves, specifically those who the author thought should have known better, for what did Uson know about, say, hypertextuality, the anti-novel, and Roberto-fucking-Bolaño?” (p. 26). In the third chapter of her book, she claims that these “Nazi literati” were precisely those who signed “the infamous, the most abhorrent official statement ever” (p. 78), but her statement remains allusive, and hence elusive, and we can only guess who they were.
Similarly, to this day, exactly 50 years after the samizdat publication of “Nazi Literature in the Philippines,” its author remains anonymous.
References
Anonymous. (2018). Nazi Literature in the Philippines. Somewhere in the Philippines: Desperation.
Bolaño, R. (1996). Nazi Literature in the Americas. New York: New Directions Books.
Ford, X. (2032). The Septic, the Skeptic, the Schismatic. Quezon: Icon Press.
Manzano, L., Locsin, A., Mercado J., Locsin A., Mendiola, J., et al. (2059). I Can See What You Did There: Flirting, with Authoritarianism. Pasay: FHM & Sons.
Padilla, D. & Bernardo, K. (2051). We’re Dating the Gangster and the Dictator. Quezon: Wattpad.
Ranada, P. (2043). You Have Already Destroyed My Career, and Now You Want to Destroy My Bathroom Too? Manila: PDR Books.
Reid, J. & Lustre, N. (2045). On the Wings of Fascism. Manila: ABS-GMA Publications.
Ressa, M. (2043, November 1). On toilets, fascism, and the autobiography as a political manifesto. Rapplest. Retrieved from: http://www.rapplest.com/…/872938-toilets-fascism-autobiogra…
Viceral, J. (2068). Super Parental Guardians: Nazi Literati in the Philippines. Manila: Bench Press.
Werpa, L. (2062). Satire and the Filipino Psyche: Can Those Two Concepts Even Exist in the Same Sentence? Makati: Orbs Publishing.
