Decolonizing Bodies, Reinscribing Souls in the Fiction of Ninotchka Rosca and Linda Ty-Casper

Abstract

While many Filipino American women writers are immigrants who have lived much of their lives in US, their work tends to center on a Philippine setting. This might be easily dismissed a nostalgic attempt to return to a lost ancestral Eden, but their focus reflects a more complex project of negotiation between past and present, between physical and psychic relocation. These writers reconstruct their country of origin a means of reaching back through barriers and dislocations caused by colonial history and migration, and thus aim at a recovery of Filipina (1) and Filipino American woman colonial and neocolonial subject. The writers examined in this essay explore issues of in a variety of its manifestations; one of central figures in these writers' project of reformulation is body. Filipino American literary critic Oscar Campomanes states that by its very nature, Filipino American culture is by chronic and multiple displacements, its texts and continue to be created under material, historical and political conditions that are better described by (post)colonial analogy of world literature rather than 'immigrant analogy' of US multiculturalism (Gonzalez and Campomanes 74). While term postcolonial is often posited monolithic and essentialist, these Filipino American women's fiction examines its layers of complexity, syncretically appropriating colonial structures, texts, and narratives. Filipino American fiction traces strains of hybridity in Philippines, which critic Lisa Lowe, in her analysis of Asian American cultural politics, defines produced by the histories of uneven and unsynthetic power relations, and marked by survival of these inequalities (82). Thus, these writers record and enact their emergence from colonial domination, their reinscription of female self figured a fighter who actively resists domination. This resistance may not be spectacular that of Assia Djebar's women of Algiers leaping down ramparts into battle, or pulling out grenades as if they were taking out their own breasts (150), but it is part of a similar project, not only in recording colonial violence against women but also in countering it by creating authentic subjectivity through female body. In figuring their resistance to Spanish and American colonialism, and to their descendant and surrogate, neocolonial US-Marcos dictatorship, these women define themselves through layers of dislocation and negotiate these uneven power relations in a number of forms, Filipinas who have lived under effects of multiple colonizers--as women dealing with patriarchy, and minority women living in US--to form a rhetoric of self-determination that enables them to take their place in world to which they have relocated. This recreation of identity is particularly evident in writing of a number of Filipino American women who have been producing significant fiction since 1980s: Cecilia Manguerra Brainard, Jessica Hagedorn, Marianne Villanueva, Ninotchka Rosca, and Linda Ty-Casper. All of these writers are part of a development described by Rachel C. Lee an evolving tradition of literary works that detail Asian/Pacific feminine postcoloniality (74). This paper will focus on body a crucial site for inscription in attempt at representation and control in experience, (Ashcroft et. al., Key Concepts 183) and in particular examine it a site for resistance of domination. The process of this resistance involves interrogation of social and cultural codes of control of body. This essay will analyze two novels, Ninotchka Rosca's State of War (1988) and Linda Ty-Casper's Awaiting Trespass (1985), particularly illuminating in their representations of bodies and souls, which, in their engagement with these codes, make their way through their complexities to arrive at a decolonizing of body (deconstructing term in process) and lead to creation of a spirituality that is predicated on their ethnic identity. …