The Living/Dead and Eco-Specters

In Joaquin’s work, the first case of spectrality involves the discovery' of Coogan’s corpse. Finding Nenita’s perfumed virgin body on a stone altar on a Sunday’ suddenly' revives past legends of forgotten babaylans or healer-priestesses in the Philippines who dwelt in the cave during the pre-Hispanic era, from the 16th to the 18th centuries. For instance, according to the novel, a Flemish physician in 1571 recorded the presence of a Lady' of the Stonehill (43), while another woman, called the Hermana (101; 176), reportedly died in the odor of sanctity in the early' 1700s. Others like Princess Kandarapa in the 17th century (171) and Doha Jeronima in the 18th century' (176) seemed to have followed suit. In this tradition, Nenita Coogan appears to be the latest occurrence of sleeping figures lying in the cave. Her “apparition” sends a warning that other bodies might come - and indeed will, through Andre - unless the pain of the colonial past is honored.

In Culture and History (1988), Joaquin explains the roles of these Hermanas who arose from the Spanish regime and, at the same time, became figures of opposition. The fact that the list includes only' women who are a mix of nobility', woman warriors, and religious figures “returning” from the early' Spanish era, indicates an unfinished articulation of Philippine postcolonial history'. As

Abraham argues, “what haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left in us by the secrets of others” (287). In other words, the buried secrets of one generation can be found in another, underscoring the transgenerational haunting from century to century. Functioning as a revenant of past rebels, mystics and warriors, Nenita returns with the vengeance of the repressed.

However, Joaquin’s description of the “body” does not seem to indicate a corpse:

“How did the body look?” asked Jack.

“Believe me, Mr. Henson - as if merely sleeping. [... ] The arms lay alongside and the feet together. And all of it completely peaceful, relaxed. The flesh was soft, almost warm. [...] When the guard and I approached, we noticed it was her body that smelled sweet. The smell came from her [...]”

(8-9)

That her return is embodied as a sleeping - possibly still living - woman blurs the distinction between living and dying. As previously mentioned, by incorporating history as a spectral presence rather than a fully narratable subject, like the silent Nenita, readers are forced to ethically consider their historical responsibility. If the girl is indeed just sleeping and, therefore, alive, she can remember and “cany the other in [herself]” (Derrida 74). In other words, she can mid-mourn.

Furthermore, Nenita is a different type of babaylan: she is half-American and fair-skinned, a hybrid. Despite her white skin and foreign background, her death aligns her with the other brown-skinned, indigenous Filipina legends of the past; she is thus “worthy” of becoming a priestess. On the one hand, through her hybridity, she reflects colonial history by combining the double culture in her. On the other hand, because of her assimilation with past babaylans, she calls for non-forgetfulness: to remember that those who died “paid for” what society enjoys today and for promises of the future. In other words, she engages with postcolonial history, negotiating between past and present, between remembering and forgetting, and between life and death.

Significantly, like the persistent babaylans, the cave itself seems to resurface despite and because of natural phenomena. In the novel, earthquakes, landslides, typhoons, and volcanic eruptions either allude to or take on a specific “role” as revenant. Thus, what appears to be an “ecological spectrality,” or what Sharae Deckard calls “green spectres” (286), can also be observed. First, earthquakes function as ’’accomplices” of the ghostly revenants. For instance, it is worth noting how an earthquake causes the cave to resurface, recall, and re-present the past:

The quake that shook Manila in August 1970 wrought invaluable damage on Barrio Bato. [...] But a prize find resulted. [...] The crumbling away of the masonry revealed the original back and, in the middle of it, the cave, with its stairway cut in the stone. All this had lain hidden for two and a half centuries behind the almost vertical wall of the embankment. [... ] The revelation excited public curiosity [...] the cave had been “sealed” with an embankment since early Spanish times. [...] By then all rumour of a lost cave on their riverbank had become for the villagers more myth than ancestral memory, a tradition that faded as it became uncertain. [...] It took the earthquake’s revelation to revive in the memories of the old certain conflicting traditions about the barrio’s lost cave

(Joaquin 41-43, emphasis mine)

The significance of August and its link with Martial Law is discussed later in the chapter. However, at this point, it is worth foregrounding how memory has been repressed: “all this had lain hidden for two and a half centuries,” “the cave had been sealed.” Hence, oblivion has settled in the consciousness of the people: the past has become a myth, no longer a reality. Although the name of the barrio or village that surrounds the cave has been changed to Terraplén de la Reina, it has failed to dislodge the old one that holds the secrets of many generations, again emphasizing the transmissibility of trauma.

Similarly, in the novel, typhoons and landslides take on an exaggerated ominous character with descriptions that are however closer to reality than fiction in the Philippine context:

The rain swept by wind seemed to be not falling but flowing, as though a sea tided in the air. Roof and wall were hit sideways; billboards fell, slapped down. Horizontal, the waters rammed against tree and post, being not so much downpour as tidal wave. The city was to be imagined as chambers under the sea, rocked by turbulence above on the surface. Submarine dusk was plunged into inkier gloom when the power failed. In the black-out, traffic waded or stalled in wheel-deep floods; houses were unroofed and shacks washed away; riverbank squatters, engulfed, had to be snatched by amphibians. A chilled city damply groped for supper candles, or made do with the lightning. It was now almost nine o-clock and the rain’s violence had not slacked since it began.

(211)

This violent storm, which may uncannily remind present Filipino collective consciousness of the Haiyan storm surge disaster of 2013, eventually kills the last Manzano heir, André. Jack tries to save him but nature overpowers them:

And then Jack heard a new sound that was no phrase in the storm’s vocabulary - a sound as of something ripped, then going on tearing. In the same moment he felt the ground under him give, sliding away swiftly but not as fast as the stones that came falling [... ] he was in rushing water, still holding André by a wrist [... ] “ André!” he screamed in horror as he felt the boy rushed away. [...] [O]f those flung into the river, only one drowned: André Manzano. [...] [AJs he ran in [the cave], the landslide had started [...] sealing with rubble what was now a new entrance. When dug out, the boy lay naked near the sill of the inner cave.

(Joaquin 214-215, emphasis in original)

Just as the earthquake allows the cave to resurface, typhoons and landslides also reopen the cave. In the novel, nature chooses what to destroy and what to rebuild, as if it had a mind ofits own. Consequently, André, a young advocate of the cave, is aligned with the inhabitants of the cave.

The shift to André as an embodied ghost is significant: as he is a Manzano, heir to a political dynasty, his “sleep” can be construed as a warning to the future state of the nation. Like Nenita who serves as a bridge, André can represent the importance of the dialogue between past and present, between nature and the city, and between climate change and political reform. That he dies at the height of both a real storm and a political demonstration underscores the links between climate disasters and the socio-political sphere, that is, between natural calamities and political responsibility. Indeed, recent studies in Environmental Humanities investigate the links between climate disasters and the histories of colonialism and between ecological research and globalization. For instance, Naomi Klein’s concept of “disaster capitalism” (2008) or Rob Nixon’s analysis of “slow violence” (2011) discuss such concerns. Kamau Brathwaite further links the effects of colonialism to what he calls “world quake” (2002). In addition, Elizabeth De Loughrey (2013) argues that US nuclear testing in the Pacific Islands and radiation research both contributed to the emergence of ecology as an academic field (16).

In Cave and Shadows, aside from the death of André, Joaquin uses the volcano to allude to political disasters. On one occasion, Chedeng Manzano observes marching activists carrying a papier-mâché volcano. When she tells Jack that she has learned to live with such demonstrations, Jack retorts: “that you’ve learned to live with a volcano doesn’t prove it’s not there” (Joaquin 51). This example not only connects a natural phenomenon with a political rally, it also foreshadows a symbolic eruption within the Manzano household. Revealingly, the growing political unrest during the Marcos regime was popularly referred to as the First Quarter Storm. These waves of demonstrations, which culminated in gradually increasing violent protests, were not only described in climatic terms, they actually paved the way for Marcos’ declaration of Martial Law.

Moreover, Diaz refers to the pounding Manila heat described in the novel as attesting “to the urgency of this political and historical moment when established rules are broken, when tensions explode, and when previously separated factions come head-to-head in eruptive ways” (11). This oppressive heat is illustrated alongside the description of August as a “violent month”:

With the rains come a change of mood and a difference in hotness. If you felt broiled in March, you feel broiled in August. The seething month has nothing of the stillness, the candor, of summer. Its heat waves are in constant stir, building up to a fit. Danger looms if the air is unclear, like a smoke. This thickens and darkens until, overheated, it explodes - into a thunderstorm, a cloudburst, a typhoon. [...] The alternation between heat wave and hurricane accounts for the myth of August as a violent month.

The novel collates climatic and political disasters to highlight the need to consider both in the same frame. Elsewhere in the novel, Ginoong Ina, one of the babaylans of the cave, claims that “irreverence towards nature is fast making the country unliveable. The mountains are deforested, the soil languishes, river and sea stink, the very air is poisoned” (148-149). According to Diaz, Ginoong Ina “aligns this irreverence toward nature with nationalism as a religion” - once again, in the context of Martial law - “and thus explains that the developmental modes of Philippine national politics are making the country unliveable” (23).

Serial colonizations and unstable political situations only complicate a climate disaster-prone country like the Philippines, which can create a “culture of disaster” according to Greg Bankhoff (2003). With volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, storm surges, droughts, and 20 annual typhoons that regularly threaten the 7,100 Philippine islands, one may ask if “recovery” is the right term to use for a country troubled by political abuse and long-term injustice and poverty (Carrigan 130). De Loughrey, Didur, and Carrigan propose that there is still an “uncritical tendency toward ‘superpower parochialism’ [Nixon] in the framing of environmental concerns that often reflects the perceptions and preoccupations of the privileged and the Global North” (6). Indeed, as part of Trauma Studies’ postcolonial turn, and Memory Studies’ eco-critical turn, climate disasters in the Global South should be continuously encouraged as objects of study. Such considerations may broaden Trauma Studies’ vision of bringing cultures together.⁷

Similar to trauma fiction, which enables the narration of the unnarratable, climate fiction allows effaced lands to be reimagined. Unlike legal literature, for example, trauma and climate disaster fictions both use creative ways of portraying loss and absence by allowing the inexpressible to be communicated. Akin to both forms of fiction, as a mode in which “writers could express their faith in imagination in the face of oppression” (Delbaere-Garant, “Magic Realism,” 75), Magic Realism can be an appropriate mode for postcolonial trauma.