Abstract
As a rehearsal of a “tropical imaginary” that attempts to accentuate the entanglement of literature with the material world, this essay ‘coincides’ Jose F. Lacaba’s 1965 poem “Ang Kapaguran ng Panahon” (“The Weariness of Time”) with the 2015 El Niño phenomenon in the Philippines and its violent culmination the following year in Kidapawan City, Cotabato Province, Mindanao. While time or panahon in the Philippine tropics is usually intuited as generative, this essay outlines the possibility of its being worn down, not simply as a “natural” consequence of the present climate emergency, but as a critical outcome of the predominant political infrastructures that practically prohibit the phenomenon of time from unfolding. As such, it becomes imperative to recognize that beyond the current conditions banally imposed as “arog talaga kayan” or “how things really are” is the urgent need for social reform—daring tropical imaginings through which Philippine time can possibly become anew.
Highlights
As a rehearsal of a “tropical imaginary” that attempts to accentuate the entanglement of literature with the material world, this essay ‘coincides’ Jose F
Despite the perceived weariness of the farmer in Lacaba’s poem, they are figured to be incessantly at labour. For even when they appear to be at rest— that is, when they seem to have completely lost all hope, lying wordlessly on the bare floor, staring at the burnt out bulb—they are still at work, in their unrelenting imaginings of ways to confront the vicissitudes of time in the tropics
Such are the workings of a catastrophe that is “slow and long lasting,” one that unfolds across “unspectacular time,” and is especially nourished by “vast structures that...constitute forms of violence in and of themselves” (Nixon, 2011, pp. 6, 10). This catastrophe includes the perpetuation of notions of the “natural” that primarily desire to preserve certain worldly configurations beneficial to only a few. This is the very irony perceived in the midst of the present Philippine climate emergency: that despite the collective experience of extreme changes brought by droughts and other phenomena induced by climate change, a certain stubbornness swarms and infests political structures, one that strategically denies the precarious situation of their constituents, and instead insists on things to keep going as they purportedly “really are.”
Summary
As a rehearsal of a “tropical imaginary” that attempts to accentuate the entanglement of literature with the material world, this essay ‘coincides’ Jose F.
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