Not wanting to waste time standing in a queue, I took along Niles Breis’s Premyo Valledor-awarded novel Kalatraban sa Alkawaraan (A Long Wait into Vanishing) with me to the polling precinct last May 9. I managed to read five pages before it was time to shade the ballot. Those five pages were enough to get me hooked, and I finished reading the novel that hot and humid day.
The book is not a casual read, partly because of the Tabaco Bikol variant used (mine is Naga Bikol), but also because of the mysterious mix of folkloric elements, and even more so, the philosophizing.
For the former, I kept Jerry Adrados’s Daratangan na Olay with its Tabaco lexicon on hand to confirm the meanings of words I could only guess through context. Some words such as kalatraban, lapradiga, agaring-gingan, sangawalban, and algatrum are coined, and others, heard from ascendants or senior neighbors, recorded in memory, and defined and preserved here like the Santo Entierro in this story. As for the philosophizing, I re-read the novel more closely, taking notes per chapter to guide my memory, as it is too difficult to summarize.
The book immerses the reader in such Bikol lore as the unglo and katambay, the heart- or palm-shaped gabi (taro) leaf, salivating black dogs, revered images, incantations, and numerology. A medieval folk religion pervades, with townspeople praying to saints’ images and to a miraculously preserved corpse. The countryside setting highlights the tit-for-tat between government constabulary and rebels during martial law. The persona says that daga (land, not rats, Breis jokes), rather than terrorism is the rebellion’s main driver.
The novel documents the interlinked destinies of librarian Purita (Purs), her imaginary friend Kikoy and childhood best friend Plas, Purs’ son Sam, and a soldier. Purs is the daughter of a former activist turned district engineer, a desaparecido of 32 years, while her rebel mother was tortured and killed by the military in Arayat. The white-eyed Plas also disappears on the night he and Purs were held hostage by the rapacious and murderous Col. Bermas. Even his post-EDSA counterpart Col. Borromeo condemns Bermas as a butcher, while considering himself as a law-abiding professional soldier. The minor characters are Purs’ wise grandparents and granduncle, and her apolitical intellectual partner Dr. Philip.
The number 32 is a motif, for example, in 32 salivating dogs and the massacre of 32 persons. In the numerology of the numbers game jueteng, 32 means “kapay” or insane, so the number suggests the insanity of a certain period in Philippine history, with discourses on remembering, taking sides, and truth. The novel records the historical truths of the kidnappings, rapes, torture, disappearances, and “salvaging,” the euphemism for Marcosian extrajudicial killings. A new meaning is provided, however, by the occultist granduncle Tang Tibot’s art of war as being won by “those who crawl.” The image of a taro leaf on the left hand is a second motif. A third motif is body stances, such as looking up (tangad), tilting the head (kiling), and crawling (kamang), metaphors for perspectives and positioning.
The book calls to mind two other novels set in Bikol, Merlinda Bobis’ Fish Hair Woman and Alvin Yapan’s Ang Sandali ng mga Mata, which also deal with killings and disappearances during the martial law years. It also seems to riff on contemporary Bikol texts about the tawong lipod or spirits, divination, the Amang Hinulid, and perhaps even Mon Suanoy’s meme of a chapbook Katcher nin Buray. But this novel has a more humorous, fantastic, and as stated earlier, philosophical take on political issues via puzzles and mysteries.
Kalatraban, or the quest for Truth, is the novel’s theme, defined as pagmidbid sa bagay-bagay na an dapat ko daang pagtiwalaan minsan, su mga mayo nin padisidir na dapat sindang pagkatiwalaan kung aakuon na an duda minsan, saro nganing klase nin katotoohan,” the recognition that I should sometimes trust those who have no conviction that they are worthy of trust, if indeed, doubt is a kind of truth.
The novel is a deeply intellectual and imaginatively dark tale that raises more questions than it answers. Reading it makes me want to dissect the novelist’s brain, the way that Joseph Addison’s surgeon inspects a beau’s head and a coquette’s heart.
If I were to discuss it in class, I would have students raise questions about characters, cultural artifacts, plot incidents, motifs, and themes, with each question invoking more questions in the deconstructive chain to aporia. Given that the reader will emotionally invest in the protagonists, I would ask how the characters would fare in the recent past and new dispensation, both dark. I would also highlight for research and context the allusions to San Salvador’s Archbishop Romero, Nassim Taleb’s randomness, Bernard Kouchner and Médecins Sans Frontières, Bob Dylan’s shift to rock and electric guitar, and Carlos Zafon Ruiz’s La Sombra del Viento. Many students in these un-intellectual times should know these ‘stranger things’, along with the truth about the pre-1986 historical period recorded here.
So much more could be written about the novel using a variety of contemporary literary lenses. For example, just as some American movies casually drop the F word, the novel bandies about the B word for female genitals in a scene of oral sex, urination, and an old Bikol joke on the odor of dinailan, fermented krill. Interestingly enough, the counterpart B for male genitalia never appears in the text. A feminist critique would take note of the ‘vulva monologue’ and pose these questions: Does this novel, written by a male, reduce women to their sexed existence? Is there more “to ‘the woman’s part’ than meets the eye”? Another tack would be the Reader Response approach to identify the Implied Reader of this text, while Cultural Studies would look into the mesh of lore and pop.
How appropriate indeed it was for me to have read this book last May 9, given the infodemic’s role in the 2022 elections. This book states basic questions about Truth that the country will confront in the next decade when a financial tsunami is expected, and when my generation who struggled through the martial law years may pass without seeing the dawn. I can only hope that the people do not forget Lolo Kikoy’s and Plas’s epistles and incantations about lamigtis (feet) and those who crawl. I also pray that what is divined in the left palm is something we will see in our own children’s palms as well, lest many of our people disappear into Alkawaraan’s void once more.
NILES JORDAN BREIS is a multi-awarded literary writer from Tabaco City in Albay. He is a four-time Palanca winner and was twice named as Fellow of the UP National Writers Workshop of UP-ICW, UP Diliman. Adept in three languages, he was declared Poet of the Year by KWF, and Writer of the Year 2012 of the Premio Arejola for being the sole winner in three genres. He also won in the Gawad Literaturang Bikolnon and was a recipient of the 2016 Outstanding Albayano Award. A summa cum laude in Philosophy, he was an instructor of Metaphysics for years and Research Fellow in Ireland and in 2019, he was the Grand Winner ex aequo of the 1st Valledor Prize for Best Novel. This 2022, he won the Pambansang Alagad ni Balagtas Lifetime Achievement Award for National Excellence in Poetry and Essay in Bikol and Filipino from UMPIL or Unyon ng mga Manunulat sa Pilipinas. He was also named 2022 Kampeon ng Wika by the Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino. He is the newly elected Head of the National Committee on Literary Arts of the National Commission on Culture and the Arts (NCCA) for 2023-2025. His book “Madrugada” is the co-winner of the 2022 Premyo Valledor for Best Novel in Bikol.
DOODS M. SANTOS is a retired Literature Professor of the Ateneo de Naga University. This book review, titled “Memory, truth, written on the body”, first appeared in Bicol Mail, June 2, 2022.
KALATRABAN SA ALKAWARAAN is a publication of Ateneo de Naga University Press, 2021. It is Niles Breis’ first novel in Bikol and co-winner of the 2018 Premyo Victorio Valledor for Best Novel in Bikol.
PREMYO VALLEDOR, the literary prize for the best contemporary Bikol novel and now in its second year, is sponsored by Victorio Cabangon Valledor, a native of Catanduanes and one of the top insurance brokers in the country today.