For my PhD program, we have two choices of qualifying exam to reach candidacy: the written exam option (basically, a timed essay in response to a set of questions set by the committee), or the portfolio option (two collections of work based on two reading lists, which can then be the foundation for a dissertation or a post-grad academic job portfolio). Anecdotally, hardly anyone goes with the written exam since the portfolio can have a life beyond the exam; in keeping with that pattern, I am also doing portfolios, and have been working on them pretty steadily in the new year.
Part of each portfolio is a scholarly essay, and I’ve been focused on the essay for my list of Philippine/Philippine American fiction. I’m still in the drafting stages of this essay, so much of my time is spent rotating through the books on my list and the pages of my notebook as I draft by hand. One of the books I’m writing about is a book I’ve written about before: America Is Not The Heart by Elaine Castillo. If, in the future, there are Castillo scholars who examine her works, I lowkey think I’d be foremost among them. I’ve written about America Is Not The Heart before, both in a previous blog post and in my first scholarly publication. One of my first conference papers used that book, again, in comparison to another book’s use of the 1991 Pinatubo eruption. I’ve taught passages from Castillo’s novel to my classes; I’m likely to do so again until reprimanded.
Earlier this week, I cracked open my paperback copy of America Is Not The Heart with the intention of skimming for how often Castillo mentions the name “Marcos” (as in Ferdinand and Imelda). I wanted just a rough ballpark number and intended to just skip around to the parts that seemed likely to contain the name. In my experience, it’s unusual for an author writing about the Marcos, Sr., administration to explicitly mention the Marcoses the way that Castillo does: without nicknames, without titles, without epithets. I’m still drafting my essay, but it’s shaping up to be, roughly, about the ways authors do or don’t name specific figures in their fiction, especially authoritarian figures. As I was skimming, though, I found myself slip into just reading the book and blazed through the first three sections in an afternoon. One of the reasons why I think I would be a Castillo scholar is because this always happens to me with her writing: I go into a familiar text and end up getting carried away by her words. I’ve read America Is Not The Heart countless times this way. When I finally got around to reading How To Read Now, her collection of essays, I similarly read several of those essays multiple times.
My favorite from How To Read Now is probably “‘Reality Is All We Have To Love,’” an essay which gets its title from a John Berger quotation that is the essay’s epigraph:
La Rabbia [Rage], I would say, is a film inspired by a fierce sense of endurance, not anger. Pasolini looks at what is happening in the world with unflinching lucidity. (There are angels drawn by Rembrandt who have the same gaze.) And he does so because reality is all we have to love. There’s nothing else.
John Berger, “The Chorus In Our Heads,” as quoted in “‘Reality Is All We Have To Love’” by Elaine Castillo in How To Read Now: Essays, 2022, p. 203.
I’ll confess that I have no knowledge of Berger nor Pasolini save for what Castillo writes about and the little Wiki-walking I’ve done out of curiosity. There is a lot in this essay that I don’t know: I’ve never read The Turn of the Screw (though I’m convinced to read it based on the case Castillo made for the book’s craft and handling of subject matter), I’ve never read the Berger short story “Woven, Sir”—in general, there’s just a lot I haven’t read. And yet, I’m simultaneously helped by Castillo’s writing to understand the things I do not know, and also made to understand that the texts aren’t specifically the point, but the experience in which those texts are embedded. For all the things I don’t know, I do know what it’s like being the only person of color in a white classroom trying to navigate the critique waters. (Though I must say that I haven’t been the only person of color in a classroom since starting my PhD, and it is a wonderful circumstance that takes some getting used to after years of that not being the case.) I do know what it’s like to write something honest, only to be stonewalled because it’s not what people want to hear. I’m still learning how to not let this deter me; I’ve never been particularly courageous or outspoken. And yet it’s increasingly untenable to keep silent about injustices. As Castillo writes, in a sweeping paragraph comprising a single sentence:
It becomes unsettlingly evident that in the absence of anything resembling justice, an artist’s instinctive respect for silence, mystery, and indeterminacy—the parts of our lives that necessarily and often indefinitely remain diffuse, inexpressible, and elusive; indeed indefinite—can be endlessly malleable, exploitable, to be subsumed in that ‘vertigo of nothingness,’ so that the emotional recognition and respect for, yes, silence, mystery, and indeterminacy can just be as swiftly manipulated to protect the powerful and estrange the vulnerable, keeping a cloud of unknowing around the form, and a cloud of unknowability around the latter, trapping them al in a mystery, a confidentiality clause, a Turn of the Screw for all times.
Elaine Castillo, “‘Reality Is All We Have To Love,’” from How To Read Now: Essays, 2022, p. 222
At some point, I’m sure I’ll take on the task of trying to diagram this sentence (something that I’ve become mildly obsessed with lately, probably because I never had to do it in elementary or middle school), but one of the many things I admire about this is that it’s a sentence at the heart of “‘Reality Is All We Have To Love’” that is, itself, the nesting doll of all the topics Castillo takes on in the essay: decolonial work, discerning true justice from the veneer of justice, and the protection and danger of silence. But it’s not a sentence that can be easily isolated from the rest of the essay; to understand all of the layers, one should really read it in context.
NB: I take notice whenever I see people mention that links to books, etc., are affiliate links, so I felt the need to say that the links here are not affiliate links. I just really like Castillo’s writing and felt the need to share. If you do read her work, I’d love to hear your thoughts!
Caroliena Cabada 