Book Review: VIAJERO - A FILIPINO NOVEL by F. Sionil Jose

Viajero by F. Sionil José
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Viajero" is the Spanish for "Wanderer." First published in 1993, it is only my 3rd F. Sionil Jose book and the 2nd of his novels that I have read.

The book is an attempt to answer the age-old question: "Why are Filipinos driven to leave the country of their birth? Why do so many choose to abandon it to its fate?"

The frame narrative is simple enough: we have a Filipino orphan saved from the Japanese and taken in by an African American soldier, raised in California, then embarks on what starts out as a global quest for identity that becomes an all consuming passion, and finally ends with him going back to the land of his birth.

We follow Salvador dela Raza (nicknamed Buddy) as he travels all around the world, researching about his country of origin. A few chapters are his imaginings of what it would have been like to be a datu crossing the West Philippine Sea to take back his kidnapped daughter, or to be a galleon ship builder making the deadly crossing to Acapulco, or what it must have been like to be Artemio Ricarte, general in three wars. I think these "intermissions" were the best bits in the novel.

"When will Filipinos realize that it is themselves who are often their worst enemy? My people are vindictive... they are petty, and they pride themselves in baubles... We are a nation of show-offs, and Imelda has captured all that is in the Filipino character."

F. Sionil Jose does not want to coddle his reader. He wields his pen as if it is a knife, as if with the intent to wound, and I found myself exclaiming "ARAY!" aloud in some parts as he tore into the faults of the ordinary Pinoy, even as he exalted the virtues of the best, most self-sacrificing of us, whom he calls "above all else, a heroic people."

"The modern Filipino has no morality, which after all, is the basis of politics, and the democratic state... As the king, so the people? No! As the people, so the king! ... Unless collaboration with the enemy, with Marcos and his rapacious oligarchy, was considered the ultimate crime against the people... on this moral bedrock will then rise an idea of a shared community."

To wander is to be an exile of sorts. There is also the exile of the uprooted Filipino like the protagonist... "an exile from his own self." Eventually, Buddy makes his way to Manila and witnesses People Power firsthand, then settles down in the tiny patch of land high up in the mountains where his American stepfather found him, and lets his chosen destiny play out as it will.

I found the last line quite poignant: "He hoists me on his shoulders. I am very glad, for up there, I can see much more."

That is what this novel does for Filipinos... it encapsulates practically all of our history in only around 300 pages... short enough for perspective, without sacrificing the important twists and turns in our moral history. And after reading it, we can see much, much more. Written in F. Sionil Jose's trademark Filipino cadence, it makes it come alive for this Filipina reader in particular, although again his descriptions of women may be considered controversial by modern standards.

"What is history? It is our capacity to remember, to make the past useful and more so for Filipinos who have permitted themselves to be lobotomized by their own willfulness... if the past can be inlaid in the living flesh, then the past becomes alive as well, perpetuated in the collective mind."

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