The Dark Geography of Ninotchka Rosca’s ‘Bitter Country’

By: Ruel S. De Vera

Philippine Daily Inquirer

State of War” is Filipina fictionist Ninotchka Rosca’s masterpiece, a breathtaking, psychedelic

1988 novel that mixes martial law, magical realism, conspiracy, Philippine history and family fate,
among many other elements. It is essential reading for Filipinos. It is also proof that you can never
read too much Rosca.

“Stories of a Bitter Country” (Anvil Publishing, Inc., Mandaluyong City, 2019, 293 pages) is a
new gathering of her stories published from 1970 to 2016. Rosca has one of the most distinctive
voices in Philippine fiction, unapologetically, hyper-aggressively literary, unashamedly political,
displaying a dangerous density with packed paragraphs. Her stories are not for the lazy reader
accustomed to being wooed. They are uniformly complicated in plot; the sentences are elaborately
sharp objects, beautiful but can wound once you pick them up.

In the first story, the titular “Bitter Country,” the reader is disoriented by the flurry of thoughts
from Marah Pais, the itinerant woman who has returned to marry in Manila but her constitution
(severe allergies to the heat and dust) and her notions (always an outsider) won’t let her really fit
in. She fixates on a younger man, a student she meets at an academic party (he is only ever referred
to as “he”) but can’t make up her mind what to do.

The mesmerizing “A Parable of Evil” begins with the planned suicide of an archaeologist named
Amadeo and then explains what led there, an unthinkable sequence of events framed by his tainted,
disjointed weltanschauung of a man far more invested in dead civilizations than the living things
around him.

Political prisoner

The later stories become increasingly sparer and more functional but still piercing in their purpose.
Now a human rights activist in New York as well as a writer, Rosca was a political prisoner at one
point during martial law and thought up several of the stories in 1983’s “Monsoon Collection”
while detained in Camp Crame; there is a separate story that runs in shards between the stories in
this section. The grim “Generations” is the most tragic, a tale of a family doomed to different kinds
of suffering in Marcosian Manila.
Her interest in science fiction shows up in “The Rings of Saturn”—or does it? Likewise, there is a
seeming fantasy element in “Sugar and Salt.” “Epidemic,” which had been included in 1986’s “100
Best Stories Published in the United States,” edited by Raymond Carver, does not feature an actual
epidemic but a metaphorical one, “an epidemic of children,” a stray thought that occurs to the
perverted physician Lazaro Reyes, MD. The funniest story is “A Woman in the Philippines” which
features a search for a former kung fu partner and a hilarious twist.

“She has felt in their company a oneness of emotion, a feeling of wandering the streets of their
country as much a stranger as they were—she and those young people who were tortured by the
fear of finally losing this last berth of their survival and who, upon nearing the border which
marked the limits of their world and the beginning of another they could not understand, would
look down at their feet, as though not seeing that bridge would mean the negation of the new
world’s existence,” she writes in “Bitter Country.”

Whether in the Philippines, Vietnam, New York, California or somewhere else, Rosca traces the
dark geography of the characters’ hidden and not-so-hidden fears; “Stories of a Bitter Country” is
not just a never-before-gathered collection from an iconic Filipina writer, but, along with “State of
War,” remains very relevant today.

“And then, quite suddenly, without warning . . . he took her, in one brief instance of shock, into
another country,” Ninotchka Rosca writes. “She had not been prepared for his words and was
swept back, back, past distance and time, with her eyes uncovered, her body unwary, back to a
place she had never seen but could see painfully clear, with only his voice for guidance, like a
portrait growing fitfully whole with the movement of a brush in an artist’s hand.” INQ