Carlos Bulosan's the Laughter of My Father: Adding Feminist and Class Perspectives to the "Casebook of Resistance"

Alquizola, Marilyn, Hirabayashi, Lane Ryo, Frontiers - A Journal of Women's Studies

In this essay we focus on a cycle of twenty-four short stories published in 1944 by Filipino American poet and author Carlos Bulosan entitled The Laughter of My Father. (1) Although this work is less commonly treated than Bulosan's novels, we draw from one of the most compelling analyses to date, presented by literary critic L. M. Grow. (2) In an article published in 1995 Grow proposed that Laughter could be read as a kind of casebook, illustrating peasant resistance against the colonial structures and the comprador class found in northern agricultural areas on the island of Luzon in the Philippines. Here we propose that it is possible to expand critically on Grow's analysis by adding feminist and class perspectives to Grow's interpretation. This in turn reveals that Bulosan had more to say about Filipino women than has been suggested in the published literature on the author and his work to date. (3)

Specifically, by sifting though each of the stories in Laughter, it is possible to elucidate lessons regarding gendered social relations based on the specific manifestations of male domination encountered by the women in a neocolonial social formation. Through an analysis of the individual stories, as well as the book as a whole, an assessment can be made of the work's lessons regarding possible responses to male domination vis-a-vis interpersonal relationships, the family, and social institutions.

WHY BULOSAN? WHY THE LAUGHTER OF MY FATHER?

For any reader who is not familiar with the life and work of the late Filipino author Carlos Bulosan, we should start with a quick overview. Although not widely known in the larger domain of North American popular culture, Bulosan, the writer and the activist, is iconic within the field of Asian American studies. Controversies during his lifetime, however, and criticism of his most famous book, America Is in the Heart, over the last two decades may have served to limit his audience. (4)

Bulosan, who remained a Filipino national even though he spent his entire adult life in the United States, was a new Asian immigrant who landed in the port of Seattle in 1922. (5) As an immigrant he was a prolific, well-recognized author for his age and educational background. A little more than a decade after his untimely death, Bulosan's legend exploded in the late 1960s. His work as a poet and author, as well as a prolabor militant, was foregrounded in the earliest classes in Asian American history, literature, and the Filipino American experience, after Asian American studies classes and programs were established at the university level circa 1968-69.

Carlos Bulosan's writing, especially his semiautobiographical novel America Is in the Heart, had a special significance in Asian American and ethnic studies for a wide variety of reasons. First, and perhaps most important, Bulosan developed a race and class perspective on behalf of his compatriots, the generation of Filipino migrant workers known as the Manongs (or "respected elders") who worked in the fields, fisheries, and canneries up and down the West Coast during the 1920s and 1930s. (6) America Is in the Heart, especially, was widely used in Asian American studies courses across the country because many of the field's founders thought that this book, in particular, most explicitly exposed the racial prejudice and discrimination that the Manongs faced before World War II. What differentiates Bulosan from most other prewar Asian immigrant authors is that, along with race, Bulosan was highly focused on the local and global class dynamics that also shaped the Filipino immigrants' labor experiences and tribulations. (7) In this same sense Bulosan was also able to position the Filipino laborers' plight within an international context, rare in terms of nonfiction Asian immigrant authors of the time. In America Is in the Heart, specifically, Bulosan spends chapters developing the portrait of how American colonial intervention in the Philippines created the macrodynamic that forced peasants from the collapsing agrarian sector in the northern Philippines to consider international migration as a possible solution to their constant cycle of poverty and debt. (8)

In particular it is worth remembering that the Philippine context that frames the short stories that appear in The Laughter of My Father entails a historical moment that immediately followed the annexation of the archipelago by the United States in 1898. While annexation did not change the plantation and smallholder agricultural sector of the economy of northern Luzon, where Bulosan's family lived, the decades that followed annexation saw the increased entrance of merchant capital into rural areas and the gradual erosion of the patron-client ties that had mitigated some of the harshest features of the semifeudal Spanish colonial mode of production. (9) This setting exemplified the growing dependency of the Philippine economy on the United States, whose manufactured goods supplanted domestic production, even as, culturally and educationally speaking, English and U.S. ideologies of politics and curriculum were both inculcated and idealized across the islands. This historical context must be kept in mind throughout any analysis of the stories in Laughter. We will return to the specific linkages among colonialism, class structures, and the gendered composition of peasant families of northern Luzon in the final sections of this essay.

L. M. GROW'S "CASEBOOK" THESIS

In a brief article published in 1995 in MELUS L. M. Grow expands upon the renowned literary critic E. San Juan Jr.'s seminal class analysis of Bulosan's corpus. G row's proposal that The Laughter of My Father serves as a kind of exemplar of peasant resistance to local structures of colonial oppression is both innovative and plausible. (10) While Grow agrees with other critics that many of the stories in Laughter entail a range of protests against various injustices, including violations of a universal sense of basic human dignity and rights and specifically addressing a system of colonial corruption and exploitation, Grow argues that the substance of the stories in Laughter goes beyond protest. (11) To Grow, a range of instances of vitality, wiliness, and subversion of class hierarchy entails a peasant habitus of measured resistance to oppression. According to Grow, "A close examination of the themes, tones, characters, and plot patterns of the LF [The Laughter of My Father] stories reveals that the stories constitute a casebook on survival in a hostile environment." (12) While this assessment is clearly applicable to many of the twenty-four short stories in Laughter, it appears to us that there is much more to it than "the illiterate peasant outwits the town official or rich man and lives to see another day" thematic often promoted in the book's reviews.

One of Bulosan's most important themes--and one that Grow neglects--has to do with the empowerment and agency of the Filipino women depicted in Laughter. What is more., we think that Bulosan fully intended to make the strength of his female characters a key focus although it seems to have been muted, if not lost, along the way, for reasons that are unclear. Note that the protagonist's family in Laughter is not named "Bulosan" (the author's father's surname), as a number of contemporary reviews--and even a blurb in the front pages of the 1944 Bantam paperback edition--claim. The fictional family's name is "Sampayan," which, as it turns out, was actually Bulosan's mother's maiden name. Similarly, it is notable that Bulosan dedicated the 1944 edition of Laughter to "Grace and Dorothy and my Mother," not to his father. (3) In addition, it is in fact Mother Sampayan who prevails in many of the stories, not the Father, nor men in general for that matter. In other words, there is a definite matrilineal slant to the people and events Bulosan portrays in the stories that were gathered together in the collection that came to be titled The Laughter of My Father. (Interestingly, later editions of the book somehow were eventually illustrated with line drawings also depicting primarily male characters.) Consequently, we will focus here on issues pertinent to Filipina women and patriarchy as represented in Laughter as they might have played out in rural peasant communities in northern Luzon at the turn of the last century, in a context couched in U.S. intervention and the new colonial regime established under U.S. rule.

To begin our own intervention, after defining pertinent terms, we set out to record instances of sexism and patriarchy that challenge the wives, mothers, daughters, and other women in the Laughter stories. We offer an analysis of Bulosan's representations of Filipina women in and around a provincial town in Luzon that is supposedly Bulosan's own. (14) We posit that Laughter presents a more complex index of Bulosan's view(s) of women, as well as his views about Filipinos in their home environment, than has been either documented or appreciated to date, including Grow's cogent 1995 analysis.

MASCULINE DOMINATION AND BULOSAN'S FEMALE TYPES

Let us begin with some heuristic definitions. For our purposes here we find it useful to adopt sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's framework for the analysis of patriarchy and sexism, where social rules and roles are correlated with gender to the disadvantage of women. (15) Bourdieu argues that masculine domination is an especially virulent kind of domination because it is naturalized and de-historicized. To the extent that both patriarchy and sexism are naturalized, they become difficult to critique because they assume the attributes of being both universal and unchanging. (16) As such, masculine domination entails physical and symbolic domination--that is, masculine domination operates by means of literal violence but also, and more insidiously, in terms of symbolic violence. (17)

Symbolic violence is hegemonic insofar as it "works" via commonly accepted assumptions about the nature of society and social relations that are so deep that they are unconsciously accepted as truths and thus embedded in the psyche. (18) These gendered and hierarchical assumptions are so deep that they are literally embodied: they are manifest in the ways that the physical body is constituted and construed in society, for example, in the very movements and mannerisms of a given individual. (19)

Never using the word socialization perse, Bourdieu nonetheless specifies that the reproduction of masculine domination is best fulfilled in three different but interrelated areas of human activity: the family, the church, and the educational system are all critical sites for the reproduction of masculine domination. (20) Because of its intimate, personal, and complicated nature, the family is first and foremost in this triad, but the two other institutions in particular play key roles in upholding normative conjugal and domestic relations in colonial and neocolonial regimes. Because of this it is pertinent to assign more power to them because of their role in reinforcing patriarchy than might be expected in other kinds of capitalist social formations.

Because oppression via gender is profoundly overdetermined, Bourdieu argues that we must work assiduously in order to denaturalize patriarchy/sexism, and ultimately masculine domination, in all analyses. This is because patriarchy and sexism are systemic. Furthermore, both patriarchy and sexism are constituted in the mind and body--they are simultaneously conscious and unconscious--and they are …

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Publication information: Article title: Carlos Bulosan's the Laughter of My Father: Adding Feminist and Class Perspectives to the "Casebook of Resistance". Contributors: Alquizola, Marilyn - Author, Hirabayashi, Lane Ryo - Author. Journal title: Frontiers - A Journal of Women's Studies. Volume: 32. Issue: 3 Publication date: September 2011. Page number: 64+. © 2009 University of Nebraska Press. COPYRIGHT 2011 Gale Group.

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