Asia’s Christian-Latin Nation? Postcolonial Reconfigurations in the Literature of the Philippines

Abstract

In Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, Derrida makes the surprising suggestion, reminiscent of Auerbach and the European philological tradition, that what we call literature may only exist because of Christian Latinity’s universalizing thrust. Could there be something Classical and something Christian that persists in the institution, or even in the culture, of literature (or of what Glissant calls “Literature”)? I propose to examine this suggestion with the help of two novels, Cebu by Peter Bacho and Mass for the Death of an Enemy by Renato E. Madrid. These ambivalent novels evoke a region of the Philippines where Christian Latinity seems to be victorious, but in subtle ways it is undermined. Crucially, it is also translated – from colonizing Spanish, through the Cebuano vernacular of the novels’ characters, and now for us into the English which, oddly, dominates “postcolonial literature.” Is imported Christian Latinity in the end recuperated, or resisted, or both, or neither? And how would the recuperation or resistance of these novels by “postcolonial literature” be affected by the classic Christian patterns – the Pauline/Augustinian divided self in Mass and the participation in Christ’s Passion in Cebu – that preoccupy the novels? Novels from the Christian Philippines are a perfect place for me to begin testing Derrida’s argument, flowing out of his meditation in “Des Tours de Babel” on Walter Benjamin, that because of the common root of the essence of literary and the sacred, languages (and, I suspect, literatures) are not foreign to one another.