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By Rome Jorge, Lifestyle Editor
Yet again, a Filipino expatriate writer makes his mark. Miguel
Syjuco—a man who has resided in New York, Adelaide and
Montreal—won the grand prize at the 58th Palanca Awards for his
novel Illustrado. It’s time to revisit one the works of his
mentor—Jessica Hagedorn’s The Gangster of Love.
There are three ways to read and ponder this
book: as a rock ’n roll novel, as a Filipino-American novel and as
a novel, plain and simple.
A rock ‘n roll novel
The Gangster of Love shares the same name as
albums from heavy metal pioneer Jimi Hendrix and blues legend Johnny
“Guitar” Watson, a verse from the Steve Miller Band song “The
Joker” and the rock band that this book’s protagonists form. The
title is just one of cultural references this book is glutted with.
Even the names of the characters are
self-descriptive: The Filipino protagonist who arrives in the US on
the year Hendrix dies is Rocky Rivera. Her Chinese-American
boyfriend is Elvis Chang. Their Afro-American drummer is named Sly.
(And if don’t know the legendary funk/soul/rock band Sly and the
Family Stone from Elvis Presley, you should give them a listen and
groove to their genius.) Rivera’s lesbian lover and painter friend
Keiko conjures images of Yoko Ono. Other character’s names are
just as evocative. Everyone from Bootsy Collins to Gill Scott Heron
is mentioned. Even the ghost of Hendrix is conjured to share dreamy
conversations with Rivera.
But name-dropping can only take you so far. The
litmus test that all rock n’ roll literature must pass—be it
Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath
Her Feet or Cameron Crowe’s script for his movie Almost
Famous—is that it resonates with anyone steeped into the rock ‘n
roll Bohemian art scene and, with meaningful insights, makes them
say, “Dude, that’s so true. I know someone just like that.
That’s really the way it really is, man.”
Instead, The Gangster of Love delivers
stereotypes. Sly just has to be a funky, drug-addled black man who
gets shot by a gangster. Gay uncle Marlon Rivera, an actor ever
waxing about his glory days on screen and on stage, just has to be
an AIDS victim. And then there are the stereotypes about Asian
Americans as personified by Chang’s rejection of his
fresh-off-the-boat parents’ values, Rivera’s gossipy balikbayan
nouveau-rich uncles and aunties and Rivera’s own Fil-Am angst and
rebellion.
A Fil-Am novel
This book was written for a foreign readership.
That’s its strength; it is free of any nationalistic or didactic
diatribes and is unburdened by any need to conform to what a
“Filipino novel” should be. Though it places it characters
during the time of Imelda Marcos’ trial in New York, it is not a
blatantly political or historical novel.
But for locals who know this country’s
day-to-day struggles intimately, it sometimes irks us how the
Philippines is remembered and imagined by expatriates and
exiles—“exoticized,” mythologized, oversimplified, overly
judgmental (a very Western trait) or simply common knowledge and
non-revelatory ho-hum.
The Gangster of Love, first published in 1995,
tackles themes that now have been rendered trite in the 21st
century: the cultural dislocation and shattered American dreams of
migrant Filipinos (Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart,
1943); the subversion of Spanish colonial Catholicism by indigenous
paganism (Nick Joaquin’s Tropical Gothic, 1972); the corrosive
effect of the Marcos dictatorship on Philippine culture (Ninotchka
Rosca’s State of War, 1988 and Hagedorn’s Dogeaters, 1990); and
the clash of cultures within the new generation of expatriate
Filipinos and their schism with parents still shackled to Catholic
guilt (most notably this book and M. Evelina Galang’s Her Wild
American Self, 1996).
For its time, this novel was at the forefront of
Asian-American literature. It must be appreciated in that context.
But today, we enjoy such books for their prose and narrative.
A novel, plain and simple
Post-modern and fragmentary, this book changes
narrators and switches from first person to third person
storytelling from chapter to chapter and throws in random anecdotes,
trivia and dream sequences. James Joyce would be so proud. The
medium is the message and the atmospheric language as well as the
meandering and disjointed narrative illustrates the very thought
processes of a generation caught between cultures, between eras and
between periods of lucidity and intoxication. And just like Jack
Kerouac’s On the Road, Hagedorn’s book ends with but another
journey. It is faithful to one of life’s truths: nothing ever ends
and nothing ever ends neatly.
Though we applaud the book’s audacity to walk
on wild side, it looses us on the road to nowhere. As with rock
songs, so too with rock literature; sometimes all we want is a few
catchy hooks, some wicked licks, a bit of pop sensibility and a
kick-ass good time. It’s only rock ’n roll but we like it.
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