Editor's Note: The following book review excerpt was originally published in THE HALO-HALO REVIEW, curated by poet, author and editor Eileen Tabios.
Halo Halo Review provides engagements with Filipino-Pilipinx literature and authors through reviews and engagements, interviews and other prose.
Was the hero’s sacrifice all in vain? I found myself asking this question as I read Brian Ascalon Roley’s The Last Mistress of Jose Rizal, a collection of short stories that captures the agony of the Filipino immigrant experience in finding home, identity and belonging in America: oftentimes indifferent and unaware, sometimes downright inhospitable an unwelcoming.
The stories depict the dysfunctions of newcomers from a former American colony still reeling from the burdens of classism, misogyny and internalized racism. A country and its people haunted by unrelenting aftershocks brought on by centuries of colonization. In sunny California, Filipina women hide from the sun, lest they get too dark. Living among Blacks and Mexicans, mothers all but forbid their precious half-White sons from dating women of color.
The gaping irony is that these newcomers are not ordinary folk; they descended from royalty, in the Philippine-revolution sense of the word. Bearing the blood of the martyred hero, Jose Rizal, who inspired a bloody revolution against centuries of foreign subjugation. However, in America, Rizal’s descendants must contend with everyday reminders and reinforcements of belittlement and shame, of their lowly places in the U.S. social strata.
Many of the stories were too painful to read, not because they were not well-written, but because they are too close to heartaches shared by many in the vast global Filipino diaspora. I forgive myself for my inability to read outside my social location: a Philippine-borne and raised Manileña who grew up in poverty. In all honesty, I had to put the book down a while, and try again. I struggled with understanding the characters, because they were all too familiar, yet distant and unrecognizable at the same time.
Halo Halo Review provides engagements with Filipino-Pilipinx literature and authors through reviews and engagements, interviews and other prose.
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| Brian Ascalon Roley |
The stories depict the dysfunctions of newcomers from a former American colony still reeling from the burdens of classism, misogyny and internalized racism. A country and its people haunted by unrelenting aftershocks brought on by centuries of colonization. In sunny California, Filipina women hide from the sun, lest they get too dark. Living among Blacks and Mexicans, mothers all but forbid their precious half-White sons from dating women of color.
The gaping irony is that these newcomers are not ordinary folk; they descended from royalty, in the Philippine-revolution sense of the word. Bearing the blood of the martyred hero, Jose Rizal, who inspired a bloody revolution against centuries of foreign subjugation. However, in America, Rizal’s descendants must contend with everyday reminders and reinforcements of belittlement and shame, of their lowly places in the U.S. social strata.
Many of the stories were too painful to read, not because they were not well-written, but because they are too close to heartaches shared by many in the vast global Filipino diaspora. I forgive myself for my inability to read outside my social location: a Philippine-borne and raised Manileña who grew up in poverty. In all honesty, I had to put the book down a while, and try again. I struggled with understanding the characters, because they were all too familiar, yet distant and unrecognizable at the same time.