Biographical research paper

A Neatly Folded Hope: The Capacity of Revolutionary Affect in Carlos Bulosan's "The Cry and the Dedication"

Author(s): Peyton Joyce

Source: MELUS , SPRING 2016, Vol. 41, No. 1, Negotiating Trauma and Affect (SPRING 2016), pp. 27-47

Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of Society for the Study of the Multi- Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS)

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A Neatly Folded Hope: The Capacity of Revolutionary Affect in Carlos Bulosan's The Cry and the Dedication

Peyton Joyce The George Washington University

In his 1942 poem "The Manifesto of Human Events," Filipino author Carlos Bulosan stages the failure of a Utopian community commemorating positive affects such as "love" (3) and "happiness" (4). In the poem's narrative, a com- munity prepares for a celebratory performance. However, the performance is

interrupted by violence before it can even begin, as "the gunmen came and wrecked I the place in the dance of our fears" (8-9). Rather than simply foreclos-

ing the Utopian possibilities encouraged by the performance, this violence orients

the poem's speaker and his community toward an oppositional response couched within affective terms:

Now we hold a neatly folded hope. When they come again with murder in their hands nobody can stop us from touching a gun nothing can keep us from throwing a bomb. (10-13)1

Significandy, "fear" acts as the affective hinge between positive communal affects

and a radicalized, concrete hope directed at a potential future, a move that Sara

Ahmed calls an "affective form of reorientation" (8).2 The poem suggests that this

hope, sustained through ideals of love and happiness, motivates a collective chal-

lenge to the social and political systems that deploy fear as a tactic.3

Although the revolutionary subjects in Bulosan's poem go unnamed, the impulse for collective resistance to violence that Bulosan describes is likely indic-

ative of his involvement in what Michael Denning calls the "cultural front," or Popular Front public culture (14).4 In 1942, in the midst of World War II, the vio-

lent opposition to aggression that the poem offers was likely understood within the context of the anti-fascist activism of the Popular Front, which Alan M. Wald

describes as "Left cultural worker[s] . . . primarily advocating a 'people's culture,'

battling for 'democracy,' and ultimately championing an anti-Axis 'victory'" (8). Bulosan would continue to expand on these revolutionary ideals in both his fic- tion and activism. Following the war, Bulosan maintained his participation in the

© MELUS: The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States.

All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]. DOI: 1 0. 1 093/melus/mlv089

MELUS • Volume 41 • Number 1 • (Spring 2016) 2 7

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Joyce

far Left. As Marilyn C. Alquizola and Lane Ryo Hirabayashi note, in the years after World War II, Bulosan "consorted with known Communists[,] . . . had friend-

ships with suspect Hollywood leftists [,] . . . had been a colleague and friend to

Filipino immigrant union leaders[,] . . . long supported Local 7 of the International Longshoremen and Warehousemen's Union (ILWU)" (35), and was even investigated by the FBI for his (alleged and ultimately unproven) involvement in the US Communist Party (41). The affective sentiment Bulosan

expresses in his 1942 poem informs his later work, particularly his final, unfin-

ished novel, The Cry and the Dedication, about a group of Marxist revolutionaries

in the Philippines. However, Bulosan seems to have had a "painful personal reassessment" of his political and sexual life in the years before his death, which

included a public distancing from the Communist Party (Wald 300), that led him

to interrogate the assumptions of "Philippine [and American] radical and social

formations" (Ponce 1 19), perhaps most explicitly the justification for violence as a

path to positive social change. As a result, The Cry and the Dedication reconsiders

the possibility of such a "neatly folded hope" (Bulosan, "Manifesto" 10) for rev-

olutionary change. In The Cry and the Dedication, Bulosan enacts a dialogue between revolution-

ary socioeconomic ideology and affective experience that revises the affective stance of "The Manifesto of Human Events" and, in so doing, questions the pro-

cesses by which such revolutions take shape. Bulosan's novel is set during the later years of the Huk Rebellion, a Marxist "peasant revolt" in the Philippines that

began in 1942 and lasted until the early 1950s (Kerkvliet xix). The Huk Rebellion,

or Hukbalahap movement (a Tagalog acronym for the People's Anti-Japanese Liberation Army), began as an anti-Japanese insurgency during World War II.

Following the Japanese defeat and the establishment of the Philippine Republic, and in large part a response to US influence and its post-war anti-communist policies, the Huk continued its guerrilla insurgency, now aimed

at overthrowing the US-backed ruling government.5 By the 1950s, the Huk Rebellion was in decline. In his novel, Bulosan is sympathetic to the socialist ide-

ology underpinning the rebellion, but, as Wald more explicitly argues, Bulosan's conflicted depictions of violence in the novel hint at "an uncertainty on Bulosan's

part about the Enlightenment heritage of Marxism as a tool of liberation" (301).6 However, Bulosan's concern with affect suggests one possible (if complicated)

means by which to productively engage with revolutionary ideology. E. San Juan,

Jr., argues that "in a dependent formation such as the Philippines^] . . . what pre-

ponderates in intellectual circles is not so much reason as hope and fear" (Introduction xxxi), suggesting the limitations of reason under a regime of terror.

In The Cry and the Dedication, Bulosan reiterates the revolutionary stakes of affec-

tive response to violence laid out in "The Manifesto of Human Events" before complicating the affective shift between fear and hope, thus critiquing the utility

of violence as a means for effecting social change. Rather than expressing the

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A Neatly Folded Hope

possibilities of oppositional combat, Bulosan's later work reassesses the affective

grammar of his poem, calling into question the revolutionary potential available

in the coupling of fear and hope. In addition, Bulosan rethinks the importance of

affect to revolutionary ideology, countering the presumption that affective responses to violence supersede reason. Instead, Bulosan argues that affective responses, in general, supplement ideology by demonstrating the common feeling

encouraged by revolutionary thought. However, more complicatedly, he also sug-

gests that affective responses precede and contour ideology and, in the last instance, offer a corrective to the rigidity of rational thought through world-mak-

ing practices contingent on but removed from ideology itself.

Unreasonable Encounters

In a 1955 letter to Florentino B. Valeros, Bulosan describes The Cry and the Dedication as the first draft of "an 800-page novel based on the Huks [sic] move- ment" ( All 155). Bulosan died before the novel was finished, and a draft was not

published until 1977 (San Juan, Introduction xxxiv).7 In the resulting incomplete

304-page novel, Bulosan employs the Huk movement to draw out the connections

between international socialism, US labor activism, and the Philippine struggle

for national liberation. The plot is simple: a seven-member guerrilla cell must travel to Manila to meet an expatriate Filipino contact and benefactor from the

United States, Felix Rivas. In order to safeguard against government infiltrators,

Rivas will be identified by Dante,8 the group's propagandist and Rivas's former

acquaintance, and Mameng, the sole woman in the group: Rivas's genitals have been disfigured during a horrifying encounter with anti-labor vigilantes in the

United States, and Mameng's role is to verify this fact through sexual contact.9

The other members of the band - Hassim, Old Bio, Dabu, Legaspi, and Linda Bie10 - provide support and protection. While the rendezvous with Rivas is the

group's primary objective, along the way, the guerrillas must also stop in their

respective hometowns to organize resistance, allowing Bulosan to stage anti-im-

perialist ideological arguments throughout his text. However, these ideological arguments are often at odds with the affective experience of the guerrillas and the people they encounter.

The Cry and the Dedication translates such revolutionary ideology through

affect, describing and producing revolutionary feeling in its readers, thus widen-

ing and revising the stakes of the movement by addressing communities both in the United States and in the Philippines.11 At the same time, the affective responses the text demands exceed (as they always do) the political theory care- fully delineated by Bulosan's revolutionaries, exposing tensions between a ratio-

nal political model of violent revolution and its lived experience. Although Bulosan's critics12 have touched on affect in their readings of The Cry and the

Dedication 13 - Tim Libretti reads Bulosan's novel through Ernest Bloch's concept

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Joyce

of the not-yet conscious, a term which José Esteban Muñoz has more recently

deployed in his discussion of the affective possibilities of hope, and Joseph Martin Ponce's work on sexuality emphasizes Bulosan's concerns with the social location of bodies in culture - none has focused on the circulation of affect within

the text as a means of revising the revolutionary ideology so frequently invoked by

the guerrillas.

Bulosan put great faith in the capacity of literature to promote social con-

sciousness. In an undated letter to the wife of Filipino writer and revolutionary

Salvador P. Lopez, Bulosan describes "the greatest responsibility of literature" to "find in [the Philippine] national struggle that which has a future" ("Letter"

211). Echoing Franz Fanon's description of political literature in The Wretched

of the Earth (1963) as that which "open[s] the mind, awaken[s] the mind, and introduces] it to the world" (138), Bulosan explains that literature must "inter-

pret the resistance against the enemy by linking it with the stirring political awak-

ening of the people and those liberating progressive forces that call for a complete

social consciousness" ("Letter" 211). In The Cry and the Dedication, Bulosan insists that "the stirring political awakening of the people" occurs through the

twinned forces of rational argument and affective experience.

The most overt signs of Bulosan's attempts to awaken the political conscious-

ness of his readers through rational, anti-capitalist arguments are the political lec-

tures given by the guerrillas as they move from town to town. Reflecting what San

Juan calls the "geometric simplicity" of the plot (Introduction xxi), these sections

of the novel obey a strict narrative structure: Hassim, the guerrilla band's leader,

and another member of the group visit that member's home village in order to

radicalize the townspeople, largely through lengthy ideological lectures. In one

of the more prominent examples, following a violent encounter that leaves his

brother, a government collaborator, dead, a guerrilla named Legaspi condemns

the "system of exploitation" embodied by "American imperialism and their native partners in plunder" (Bulosan, Cry 160) before invoking an international

solidarity of workers. Toward the end of his lecture, addressed to his father, Legaspi explains why the guerrillas do not salute their flag with a hand over their

heart: "The heart is faulty, it vitiates and abrogates the dictates of the mind" (161).

Legaspi's statement privileges rational thought and disregards affective responses as the mark of a true social consciousness, what Wald calls the text's "rel[iance] on 'reason' as a version of utilitarian calculation poised to master all

the contradictions" (300) of revolutionary praxis. Such reasoning is quickly put to

the test when Legaspi's lecture is lost on his father, who disrupts it by asking about the place of religion in the underground. The father's question is answered

by Hassim, who represents an idealized revolutionary subjectivity, modeling the privileging of reason at the expense of emotion. Earlier in the text, Legaspi himself

wonders if Hassim "has steeled himself against emotions," considering it proof

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A Neatly Folded Hope

that Hassim's "intellectual capacities are above [his own]" (Bulosan, Cry 140). However, in this instance, Hassim recognizes the impossibility of disregarding

emotion; although "he want[s] to explain the political issue as it was tied up with

the economic situation" (161), he must instead address the issue through a more

generalized apolitical explanation that attends to the father's emotional response

to his son's death. Affective forces emerge over and over again, disrupting but

also supplementing the rational social critique exemplified in Legaspi's speech. Thus, Bulosan suggests that revolutionary praxis is easily foreclosed, calling into

question the utility of the ideological lectures that fill his text.

As the father's question suggests, throughout the text, the affective is associated

with nonintellectual peasant tradition. While the guerrillas discount such a tradi-

tion as one lacking the proper social consciousness, across his oeuvre Bulosan declares the folk tradition the primary aspect of Philippine national literature,

one which supplements the social consciousness of political intellectualism. In a

1950 letter to Jose de Los Reyes, Bulosan explains that he tries to "utilize common

folklore, tradition, and history in line with [his] socialist thinking" ("CB" 73), a

position taken up in The Cry and the Dedication by Bulosan's alter ego, Dante.

In his book Tales of My People (a title taken from one of Bulosan's own unpub-

lished works), Dante combines autobiographical experiences with "legends and folklore and lost tales," in the process fostering "happiness and a feeling of close-

ness to the Philippines and [its] people" (Bulosan, Cry 194). Later, in an almost

verbatim version of Bulosan's essay "How My Stories Were Written" (1972), Dante recounts a conversation with Apo Lacay, an old peasant who is the source

of the folklore rewritten in Dante's (and Bulosan's) early work, that challenges the

intellectual preference for reason. Dante explains to Apo Lacay: "Man has a mar-

velous mind. He can think, analyze, break apart and put things together." Apo

Lacay responds: "That is the seed of all living fears. The mind of man. The beasts

in the jungle with their ferocious fangs are less dangerous than one man with his

cultivated mind in a civilized city. It is the heart that contains the world of truth

and beauty. The heart is everything" (198). In stark contrast to Legaspi's claim that "the heart is faulty," Apo Lacay implies that positive affect counters the fear

brought on by rational arguments and their application in the modernizing world.

Apo Lacay, as the epitome of the Filipino folk tradition, expresses a national folk

culture that underscores the importance of affect in revolutionary movements.

Thus, while Bulosan "utilizes folklore" to articulate his "socialist thinking," he also

suggests that the affective dimension of life that folklore illustrates must be a nec-

essary part of a successful social movement.

Bulosan's argument joining affect and reason is perhaps his most prescient with regard to many current conceptions of affect theory. Although Bulosan's revolutionaries privilege the reason and logic of ideology (in word if not in action), Bulosan himself grapples with the primacy of affect on this ideology. Psychologists such as Robert B. Zajonc and Richard S. Lazarus have attended

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Joyce

to affect's role in cognition. Zajonc famously argues in "Feeling and Thinking: Preferences Need No Inferences" (1980) that "the form of experience that we came to call feeling accompanies all cognitions" and that this may occur "at any point of the cognitive process" (154). Further, as Lazarus suggests, affective responses "are the product of reason in that they flow from how we appraise what

is happening in our lives. In effect, the way we evaluate an event determines how

we react emotionally" (87). Importantly, Lazarus suggests that the division between rationality and feeling is a construct of Western thought, and as Mel Y. Chen points out, the opposition of rationality and feeling supported systems

of oppression in which "the responsibilities of feeling then fell to lower places

on the hierarchy - women, animals, racialized men, disabled people, and incor-

poreals such as devils or demons" (46). Apo Lacay's declaration that "the heart is

everything" interrogates revolutionary ideology from the colonial margins by asserting the primacy of feeling from a folk culture that, as Bulosan's collected works demonstrate, is not simply the peasant culture of the Philippines but the

contingent working classes of the world. Such a declaration emphasizes that socialist thinking must begin with feeling if it is to succeed, a claim Bulosan spends the entirety of The Cry and the Dedication investigating.

In "Hope and Hopelessness: A Dialogue" (2009), José Esteban Muñoz coins the expression "feeling revolutionary," which he defines as "the feeling that our current

situation is not enough, that something is indeed missing and we cannot live with-

out it" (Duggan and Muñoz 278). "Feeling revolutionary," a collective affective expe-

rience of what John Protevi calls "political affect," becomes the way in which

"individual bodies politic cognize [specific] situations" (35). For Muñoz, drawing from the work of Ernest Bloch, "feeling revolutionary" begins in a negative affective

space but orients subjects toward a Utopian future, "open[ing] up the space to imag-

ine a collective escape, an exodus, a 'going-off script' together" (Duggan and Muñoz

278), an argument that parallels Libretti's own discussion of Bloch in relation to The

Cry and the Dedication. For Libretti, Hassim in particular "charts the path to the

new, the not-yet-conscious, through a projection of past pleasures and promises that ratify what Bloch calls the principle of hope, anticipations or extensions of

'existing material into the future possibilities of being different and better'" (142).

Significantly, Muñoz's invocation of the not-yet-conscious exposes the com- munal aspect of hope absent in Libretti's argument. Although Bulosan depicts individual affective reorientations through radicalization, many of the most pro-

vocative affective experiences in the text emphasize the capacity of affect to form

"collective escapes" in the present as a synthesis of ideology and revolutionary

feeling. In one instance, during a march between villages, Hassim explicates the connection between the revolutionary goals of the movement and the affective

experiences that supplement them:

They were propelled toward [the end of their struggle] by a common feeling of adventure

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A Neatly Folded Hope

the end, where the purpose would be compounded with all their anxieties, fears, thoughts, tenderness, and joys; as though everything that they had lived for would

come to this very purpose, would crystallize in it finally

vital in an experience shared in common, he knew, that bound people together; ... for in such experience, the commonly shared, individual freedom and diversity were arrogated into a collective creative purpose, thus opening the way to a more wholesome activity for the common good. (Bulosan, Cry 180)

In this insightful passage, Hassim recognizes the potential of emotional experi-

ence, both positive and negative, to the struggle. Importantly, Hassim argues that

the guerrillas' affective experiences - "anxieties, fears, thoughts, tenderness, and

joys" - supplement the rational purpose of the struggle through the formation of

collective bonds of "an experience shared in common," revising without denigrat-

ing Apo Lacay's claim that "the heart is everything" (198), thus synthesizing the

peasant and radical traditions. As Hassim implies, a focus on affective experience

expands (and critiques) the rational and ideological basis for revolution and is, at

the same time, a strategy for the creation of a community that recognizes the

specificity of the Philippine context and connects it to various international strug-

gles against exploitation (without standing in for these struggles). Hassim thus

refigures what San Juan calls the novel's "allegory of revolutionary praxis" (Introduction xxix) into the practice of revolutionary feeling that translates the

logic of revolutionary ideology into a lived affective experience.

The Transmission of Revolutionary Feeling

In the United States, the Huk Rebellion was publicized in Huk leader Luis Taruc's

1953 biography Born of the People 14 and in the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 37 Cannery Workers 1952 Yearbook, edited by Bulosan and featuring commentary by Taruc and American Huk leader William J. Pomeroy. Criticism on The Cry and the Dedication has generally agreed

that Bulosan used Taruc as a historical source15 - San Juan suggests that the gen-

eral plot of his novel "could have been inspired only by . . . Taruc's memoir" (Introduction xxxiii), and Ponce points out the correlation of "sociopolitical themes" in both works (102).16 However, San Juan cautions against reading the novel as "a documentary transcript of the actual Hukbalahap movement" (Introduction xxxv). Instead, as Ponce notes, "Despite the thematic and ideolog-

ical similarities between The Cry and the Dedication and Born of the People, Bulosan's novel interrogates Taruc's resolute political agenda of 'national libera-

tion'" (105) by "also articulai [ing] a transnational connection of solidarity" (106).

Along with this ideological reconfiguration toward transnational socialism, Bulosan reworked primary source material, including Taruc's autobiography and William Pomeroy's essay in the ILWU 1952 Yearbook, emphasizing the affec- tive dimension of the Huk movement to question the potential of socialist

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ideology divorced from feeling and offer a revised affective ideology that begins

with collective feeling.

In "The Manifesto of Human Events," Bulosan suggests that violence and its

attendant affective response, fear, precipitate such revolutionary feeling, a move-

ment reiterated in both Taruc's Born of the People and The Cry and the Dedication.

Bulosan draws on and expounds the affective arguments in Taruc's work linking fear and revolutionary praxis. Taruc emphasizes that affective responses to this

violence have the capacity to revolutionize the population, noting that "the hatred

of the masses for their persecutors [produced through terror] is a positive emo- tion. It counteracts fear and complacency, and makes them ready to act and to

support action against the persecutors" ( Born 246). While Taruc is content to explain the process of revolutionary feeling, Bulosan deploys this affective frame

to reconsider the consequences of the Huk Rebellion described in Taruc's auto-

biography and of revolutionary movements defined, as Muñoz does, more gen-

erally. Such a focus necessarily hinges on the relationship between fear and hope. In doing so, Bulosan is less interested in documenting the Huk movement

than in thinking through the contradictions of revolutionary movements in gen-

eral, both in the United States and abroad. In particular, the "ambiguity and con-

tradiction" (Wald 302) with which the novel ends17 calls into question the oppositional tactics tacitly endorsed in "The Manifesto of Human Events."

Bulosan elaborates what are in Taruc's autobiography very brief descriptions

of violence,18 employing biographical histories of the guerrillas to illustrate the

ways in which the affective economy of fear circulating throughout the Philippines reorients subjects toward the underground. Although Bulosan expands the affective dimension of Taruc's autobiography, his writing reflects

Pomeroy's rhetorical conflation of social consciousness and affective response in an article, "Heritage of Truth," in the 1952 Yearbook, edited by Bulosan. In

the article, Pomeroy riffs on the question, "What can a man do?": "What can a man do? I am not blind. I am a man of feeling. Having trained myself to think

socially, I felt it deeply when my fellowmen [sic] were murdered, tortured, and starved." As Pomeroy implies, revolutionary feeling is created not only through

individual experiences of violence but also through an empathetic response to representations of such experiences. Pomeroy's social feeling, in response to the terror inflicted on the Filipino populace, engenders an obligation to "take sides" and "fight," suggesting one way that literature offers a material revolution-

ary praxis through affect.

Although Bulosan's text is filled with anti-imperialist ideology, significantly, the narrative begins by recounting state-sponsored violence. Only ten pages into the novel, Hassim, the group leader, considers a fellow guerrilla's past:

[Hassim] knew [Old Bio's] two sons had been thrown over a high cliff at the mouth of the river in his village by the special police of the town hacendero and that one of

his granddaughters hanged herself after she had been repeatedly raped by fifteen

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A Neatly Folded Hope

constabulary men. The old man wanted to die then, fighting the enemy with a bolo.

But one of Hassim's men dragged him away, and the two of them escaped to the mountains. That was how he joined the underground at the beginning of the war. (Bulosan, Cry 10)

As Hassim is the "chief of the underground's counterintelligence unit whose sole

responsibility was the gathering of information relating to the atrocities and bru-

talities committed on the people by the enemy and the mercenary police of the

landlords" (10), we might read Hassim's interest in Old Bio's history as an exam-

ple of the archival impulse to document violence as testimony of fact. Such a read-

ing reveals the incongruity between documentary works such as Taruc's and Pomeroy's autobiographies and Bulosan's text. Although it locates itself within

a specific historical context, Bulosan's goal is not to document such violent inci-

dents but to explore the complicated responses to violence and their conse- quences for collective action. Rather than witnessing atrocity in order to make

a claim for justice and support (although this is certainly one potential effect

of the text), Bulosan's narrative instigates a communal oppositional response through the circulation of negative emotions within the group. Hassim's memory

of Old Bio's history is prompted by Hassim's own "melancholy feeling that [makes] him think affectionately of the old man" (10), and Hassim's "bitter" response to his memory provokes him to recall his own losses in the days imme-

diately preceding the murder of Old Bio's family: "[H]is father during the long retreat to the mountains," "a brother," and "three of his men" (11). In this

way, the circling and doubling of terror elucidates the stakes of revolutionary feel-

ing. The terror that impels the Huk to fight is reiterated, thus providing proof of

the need for revolution, but terror also becomes a shared experience in a revolu-

tionary consciousness as these acts of terrifying violence are always intertwined.

If, as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have famously argued, "The success of a

revolution resides only in itself, precisely in the vibrations, clinches, and openings

it gave to men and women at the moment of its making" (177), the revolutionary

potential of Bulosan's novel operates through the transmission of feelings within and between the text and the disparate transnational communities Bulosan con-

siders. The success of Bulosan's novel as revolutionary propaganda depends less on transcribed lectures than on what the French anarchist revolutionaries

referred to as The Invisible Committee call the spread of revolution "by reso- nance": "Something that is constituted here resonates with the shock wave emit-

ted by something over there" (12). Although ideology might scaffold the connections between individuals and groups, these connections occur primarily through affect, suggesting the limited utility of ideology to engender revolution.

This is most evident in the ways that the guerrilla group responds to the violent mutilation experienced by their American contact, Felix Rivas.

Dante recounts his history with Rivas in the United States, from their time as

migrant workers to Rivas's participation in the labor movement. Dante explains

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Joyce

that the last time he saw Rivas, Rivas was recovering from being "beaten by vig-

ilantes in San Jose . . . where he had gone to organize the fruit pickers" (Bulosan,

Cry 40) and describes Rivas 's most significant wound in detail: he notes that the

men "crushed [Rivas's] testicles" (41) so badly that "the right ball is [the] size [of

a fist] but soft as cotton [and] the left is gone: only a wrinkled bag is left" (42). At

first, the terrifying image of genital mutilation is "so sharp that it violently jar[s

the guerrillas'] thinking" (41). For a moment the affective force of the image exceeds thought, and the guerrillas exist in a state of affective being. Terror and sadness move from an individual to a collective experience. As the "sadistic

monstrosity" of the violent act "seep[s] into their disturbed consciousness," Dante's sadness circulates through the group, "sink[s] into their troubled minds . . . and disturbed consciousness," and becomes "their sadness" (41).

The communal transmission of terror becomes embodied intensity in the guer-

rilla band: "Linda Bie snapped his flute into two pieces, so great was his anger,"

"Hassim . . . sighed" and "felt dizzy," "Old Bio cursed for the first time in his life,"

Dante "whispers angrily," and Dabu "hurled [a stone] with all his might against a

tree . . . trembling with rage" (41-42). Bulosan emphasizes how the experience of

terror can resonate with and recontextualize the lives of the community and how

affect is then employed in support of rationality, as affective experience under-

girds cognition. The text explains that image of Rivas's mutilation is available

for [the guerrillas] to remember always, if they wanted to consolidate the ashes of the past into a flaming phoenix of faith, to set afire the darkness of their own lives

with it

remember. It was up to them now to besiege their individual lives with the sangui-

nary reality of that cruel image. (41)

The image allows an affective experience that leads to the possibility of a remak-

ing of its meaning in the language of hope. Through shared affect, the guerrillas

can "set afire their own lives" and "give [the future] another name." Through his

expression of sadness, Dante calls into being a community that transforms the "dark secret that was unbearable for him to remember alone" (41) into a critical

potentiality founded through an affective experience of and reaction to terror.

The affective experience the guerrillas share in response to the "cruel image"

(41) suggests the ways that the novel might resonate with the reader. Repeatedly,

Bulosan posits the communal capacity of affective responses to violence. At the

same time, through the narrative expression of affective excess, Bulosan's descriptions of violence - from the circular memory of the deaths of Old Bio's

and Hassim's families to Mameng's story of self-mutilation in the midst of her

first sexual experience and the shocking violence done to Dabu's mother and his own act of revenge - call his readers to experience this affective position or

at least respond to its resonating affects. As "The Manifesto of Human Events"

makes clear, the production of affective propaganda was common in Left

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A Neatly Folded Hope

literature. Contextualizing Bulosan's work within leftist literature during the Cold

War, Wald argues that "the writings of the Left are not simply reprisals of doc-

umented facts, nor are they vessels of 'political theory."' Instead, Wald posits that

leftist writing emphasizes emotional experience, "permitting readers to imagine

themselves at events and to undergo the passions of the protagonists" (294).

The terror and sadness quite literally transmitted to the group by Dante's description of Rivas's mutilation are also transmitted to the reader through the

formal structure of Bulosan's writing, although this does not necessarily register

as fear itself but rather as an affective openness. Unlike Taruc, who describes ter-

ror in a word, phrase, or single sentence, Bulosan lingers on these terrifying images. As he describes Felix's disfiguring wound, Dante's speech is marked by pauses and gaps in which both the guerrillas and the reader become increas-

ingly anxious:

"He was - " he stopped suddenly, looking sideways at Mameng. "He was what?" Legaspi asked. Dante hesitated.

"Go on," Old Bio urged him.

Dante's eyes became sad. And his sadness rode swiftly back on the turbulent crest of unforgotten years, unforgettable time. He bent his head away from Mameng, while his companions leaned close to him, trying to shut Mameng from the long-awaited pronouncement.

"They crushed his testicles." Dante whispered. There was silence for a full second. (Cry 40-41)

The excess of affect experienced by the reader in the passage above is not only the result of the narrative that Dante tells. Instead, it is bound in the invisible forces of

the rhythm of its telling, which captures terror through the expansion and con-

traction of speed. In one sense, rhythm is the sensation of movement above and

beyond the literal, which makes an affective claim on the individual. As Teresa

Brennan argues in The Transmission of Affect (2004), "Rhythm is a tool in the

expression of agency, just as words are. It can literally convey the tone of an utter- ance, and, in this sense, it . . . unite[s] word and affect" (70). Brennan finds that

rhythm may be visual and auditory, and she differentiates the figurai or narrative

image from its affective register. The visual is both an "anatomical . . . registra-

tion of an image in the mind's eye" (70) and a transmission of the image through

a resonating "physical vibration" (71). The narrative rhythm of Dante's pro- tracted story contrasts with the guerrillas' urgent and immediate responses. At

the same time, the affective resonances of this violence inform cognitive thought

to expand the specific historical location of the Philippine insurgency: the text

associates US anti-labor violence (Rivas) with state-sponsored violence in the Philippines (Hassim) and sexual violence (Mameng), encouraging a similar

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Joyce

response from readers in one or more of these locations and assembling a con-

tingent affective community.

Revising Violence

Throughout the first half of the novel, the members of the underground empha-

size that although affective responses to violence reorient subjects toward oppo-

sitional action, such action is only properly revolutionary to the extent that it

conforms to rational ideological discourse. The guerrillas outline the "proper" function of revolutionary feeling to a father and son they encounter in the woods.

Like the guerrillas, the father and son have recently suffered under the violence of

the Philippine government; earlier that day, the mayor of their town murdered

their family and abducted a daughter in reprisal for the murder of a collaborator

that occurred during World War II. When the two men express plans for revenge,

Hassim cautions them against doing so. Hassim's comments anticipate Fanon's claim in The Wretched of the Earth that the immediate violent urge for revenge is

not a true revolutionary feeling but instead an inefficient and useless reaction to

suffering. Fanon explains: "A legitimate desire for revenge . . . cannot sustain a

war of liberation. Those lightning flashes of consciousness which fling the body

into stormy paths or which throw it into an almost pathological trance . . . where

[one's] blood calls for the blood of the other . . . [fall] to pieces if [they are] left to feed on [their] own substance" (111). For Fanon, the affective reaction, which he

describes as irrational and located in the body/mind itself, is ineffective inasmuch

as it positions the subject as an individual rather than as a part of a collective struggle. In Bulosan's novel, the father reaffirms such an individual perception

of violence as a singular event in his response to Hassim: "Perhaps you have never

seen your family butchered like pigs?" (Bulosan, Cry 212). In contrast, Hassim

explains the way that individual experiences of violence connect the father and

son to the guerrillas through a communal affect:

[Hassim] said calmly, 'That is precisely why I am advising you to join the underground

family

in our country are people like you, people whose families were murdered or scat- tered in the hills. We are suffering together. (213, emphasis added)

As if to prove the efficacy of Fanon's claim, Hassim's invocation of the common

experience, bound by "suffering together," elicits a response from the father and

son, who "would like to know more about [the underground]" (213). As Fanon and Hassim suggest, the experience of terror must be used to foster a

communal revolutionary feeling that looks to the future and is based on a theo- retical framework of revolution and liberation. Bulosan is interested in the limits

of this ideology even when supplemented by a common political affect. As

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A Neatly Folded Hope

Fanon's word of caution suggests, affective response always threatens to disman-

tle ideology. As his novel progresses, Bulosan demonstrates the impossibility of

adhering to an ideology guided only by reason. Although he locates the guerrillas'

revolutionary origins in moments of violence, implicitly validating the armed retaliation of the insurrection through what Wald calls "rationalistic reasoning

that amounts to an 'end justifies the means' form of brutality" (302), as the novel

progresses, the easy affective grammar in which fear is productively marshaled toward the revolutionary cause and the formation of an affective community

begins to rupture, and the guerrillas' engagements become marked by the "light-

ning flashes" of retaliatory violence provoked by the murder of loved ones. The

guerrillas' mission spins out of control as members participate in a murder at a

village wedding and a massacre of collaborators instigated by the torturing of

Dabu's mother, refuting the rational arguments the guerrillas made to the father

and son, who soon leave to take their own revenge. By the novel's conclusion, in

which Dante is killed by his own brother, violence is shown to be disorganizing,

unsettling the convincing ideological arguments made earlier in the novel. As he is dying, Dante remembers a conversation he had with "a young poet who

had lived with him in Seattle for a while" (Bulosan, Cry 290). 19 The brief discussion

underscores the failure of both reason and affective collectivity, bringing up contra-

dictions that threaten to explode the underpinnings of revolutionary practice:

What did that sonofabitch tell me when we were rooming together in that cold room? [Dante] reflected. "Now, now, Conrad [Dante's real name]," he had said. "Violence doesn't settle anything. It only breeds violence." And then he had asked in anger and desperation, "What is the way then?" And that bastard of a poet, who was dying of tuberculosis, had answered, "Well, Conrad, understanding and toler- ance are our best weapons in this our fight for a better world." And [Dante] had screamed, "Hell! Hell! Hell! I hate this world! I hate the whole human race!" And

the dying poet had looked at him with sad eyes. And it was that look of sadness that had followed him everywhere [since]. (290-91)

The young poet is unnamed although he seems to share something of the young Bulosan. If the conversation stages Bulosan's own interrogation of justified vio- lence, it yields only contradictions. Although we can read Dante's violent death as

proof of the poet's argument that violence can "never settle anything," Dante's hatred for "a world that had pressed him to a dark corner of life" (291) and his and Rivas's victimization in the United States suggests that the poet's call for "understanding and tolerance" is of limited utility for effecting real change. If nothing else, this conversation calls into question the "moral certainty" under

which violence can be rationally deployed by a revolutionary movement. Dante's dying reflections reveal the contradictions within a revolutionary prac-

tice that justifies violence through reason and suggest the limits of ideology. This

disparity between the guerrillas' rational discourse of revolutionary ideology and their actions exposes the failure of rational ideology as a mode of collective

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Joyce

resistance. While it is clear that Bulosan puts great stock in socialist ideals, the

confusion with which the novel ends emphasizes the difficulty in putting these

ideals into practice in the real world. Bulosan suggests that ideology cannot sim-

ply depend on rational thought or even a "reasonable" affective collective response but must take into account the many (conflicting) affective responses

of each individual at any given time that problematize the rigidity of ideological

reasoning. Although he is unable to articulate an affective ideology, Bulosan out-

lines both the promise and danger of affect on revolutionary thought. Affect is

messy and complicated, supplementing ideology while at the same time derailing

it, but, as Bulosan's novel argues, it must be taken into account and incorporated

into ideology if success is ever to be achieved.

A Neatly Folded Hope in the Present

If The Cry and the Dedication is above all else a dialogue between ideology and

feeling, its primary success is in demonstrating the necessity of affect to revolu-

tionary movements, even when affect offers no assurances of success. Although

ambivalent about the success of revolutionary ideology as a political stance, Bulosan offers a resolute claim for the promise of collectivity and collective hap-

piness as a form of revolutionary practice in the present that refigures the revo-

lutionary orientation toward the future by offering what Muñoz calls "a collective

escape" (Duggan and Muñoz 278). This is not to deny the significance futurity plays in revolutionary ideology. Hassim explains that the Utopian promise of hap-

piness lies in the world they are creating: "Would that there were another kind of

world, where happiness is as common and cheap as the air we breathe. We know

the possibility of that world - we see it in the collective future of our work"

(Bulosan, Cry 232). Libretti argues that the Utopian potential of the future is based

on an engagement with past affective experiences, suggesting that "in order to

begin imagining a possible future," Bulosan's text "prompts one 'to look home- ward'" (143). However, as Libretti points out, positive affect associated with Uto-

pian feeling (hope, happiness) often emerge from the guerrillas' engagement with

negative affect. He argues, "Returning home to find not an idyllic childhood haunt

but instead scenes of destruction and suffering, the characters in The Cry and the Dedication realize that the future must be invented anew and not reconstructed

out of the romantic past" (142).

In contrast to the future that guides Hassim's hope, Bulosan argues for a col-

lective feeling in the present that, while divorced from revolutionary ideology and

fear , feels revolutionary in the way that it creates bonds between members and, as

Ponce notes, also revises gender and social roles. In one of the most affectively rich

passages in the novel, the members of the band wait anxiously at a campsite while

Hassim and Old Bio visit Old Bio's home village. "In order to break the anguish of waiting," Linda Bie, an accomplished musician, plays his flute while Legaspi and

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A Neatly Folded Hope

Mameng begin to dance (Bulosan, Cry 1 11-12). Linda Bie continues with a popular

Filipino folksong, accompanied by Legaspi, as Mameng and Dante continue danc-

ing:

Again and again Linda Bie played the rollicking folk song, and Legaspi sang it at the

top of his lungs. Their merriment filled the air. Birds fluttered above them with

envy. A wild goat crawled up the hill to see them, hiding behind a tree and watching

them with dull eyes. Farther down the glade was a shoat, its black ears flipping in accompaniment to the song

of his reed flute, was touched beyond words. Where had he seen such happiness last? In what house, in what village, in what town? This was the life he knew and would like to know again

of Dabu's happiness. They kicked the knapsacks away and held each other, Legaspi taking the part of a woman. And Linda Bie played on, trying hard not to sob; his heart was aching so. (113-14)

In this moment, the pastoral merging of folk tradition and the natural landscape

creates a collective happiness. Ponce argues that, although

the possibility of happiness is framed as the recovery of Linda Bie's (romanticized) past as well as the projection of a (utopian) future, . . . rather than view this moment as merely a Utopian anticipation of a joyful life that can only be known on the other side of revolutionary transformation, one can read it as the dialectical counterpoint in the present to the radical political program . . . elaborated in all of

the characters' homecomings. (102)

Ponce's insightful comments emphasize the emergent affective possibilities of

revolutionary feeling so eloquently described by Deleuze and Guattari as "the vibrations, clinches, and openings it [gives] to men and women at the moment

of its making" (177). Bulosan emphasizes the "contagion of. . . happiness" cir- culating throughout the scene, a moment of collective world-making in the present. Although contingent, as Ponce points out, this moment suggests a counterpoint to not only the radical political program but also the overarching

affective economy of the text. Although related to the "common feeling of adventure" (Bulosan, Cry 180) Hassim feels for the collective during the mis- sion, in this moment, ideology and the mission have been set aside. The guer- rillas' "neady folded hope" ("Manifesto" 10) opens, if only briefly, allowing a "happiness" (4) in the present even if such an affective experience is ulti- mately foreclosed by violence and failure. As Deleuze and Guattari note, "The victory of a revolution . . . consists in the new bonds it installs between

people, even if these bonds last no longer than the revolution's fused material"

(177). Although such a victory will not guarantee the creation of political autonomy, Bulosan suggests in these instances that collective intimacy in the present is vitally integral to the revolutionary movement and is perhaps the only success possible.

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Joyce

Notes

1 . " A Manifesto of Human Events" was first published in 1 942 in the Bulosan-edited

Chorus for America: Six Filipino Poets (Wagon and Star) under the pen name

"Cecilio Baroga" ("Publication" ix). It was later republished in On Becoming Filipino : Selected Writings of Carlos Bulosan (1995). The publishing rights have

since reverted to the Bulosan estate. Efforts to contact the estate for permissions

were thorough but unsuccessful. Temple University Press (contacted 19 March

2015 and 15 January 2016) had no contact information for the estate and neither

did the University of Washington Press (contacted 25 January 2016), publishers

of the recent edition of Bulosan's America Is in the Heart (2014). Wagon and Star

Press is now defunct, so I attempted to contact Harcourt, Brace, and Company,

the original publisher of Bulosan's America Is in the Heart (1943), now merged

into publishing house Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, but as of the time of publica-

tion, I have not received a reply. In a promising lead, Conor M. Casey, a labor

archivist at the University of Washington, where the Carlos Bulosan archives

are kept, passed along an email address for Karen Bulosan Gentile, the point

person for the Bulosan estate. However, attempts to contact the estate (20

May 2015 and 3 December 2015) met with no reply. Lane Ryo Hirabayashi and Martin Ponce, who have both recently published on Bulosan's work, were

gracious enough to chat with me but also had no contact information to share.

2. In The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004), Sara Ahmed argues that emotions "in-

volve a stance on the world, or a way of apprehending the world" (7) and suggests

the connection between individual affective response and community identity.

Ahmed calls this communal dimension of feeling an "affective econom[y]"

(46), the ways in which individual affective responses are consolidated into com-

munal identity based on orientations to specific emotions. Ahmed provides the

theoretical language to define the process of reorientation by which shared affec-

tive experiences of fear and hatred foment identification with revolutionary movements and initiate the creation of more fleeting affective communities.

3. I use affect to mean the embodied intensities related to emotional states such as

fear/terror and hope. Lauren Berlant usefully points out that, regardless of the

debates over what is and is not an "affect," "affective atmospheres are shared,

not solitary, and bodies are continuously busy judging their environments and

responding to the atmospheres in which they find themselves" (15). I am most

interested here in how Bulosan represents the formation of an affective revolu-

tionary community within his text and uses affect to create a revolutionary feeling in his readers.

4. For a deeper consideration of Bulosan in relation to the Popular Front, see Alan

M. Walďs American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War (2012) and

Stephen J. Mexal's "Toward a Transnational Liberalism of the Left: Positive Liberties and the West in Carlos Bulosan's 'America'" (2013).

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A Neatly Folded Hope

5. For a more detailed history of the Huk Rebellion, see Luis Taruc's Born of the

People (1953) and He Who Rides the Tiger : The Story of an Asian Guerrilla

Leader (1967), William J. Pomeroy's The Forest : A Personal Record of the Huk

Guerrilla Struggle in the Philippines (1963), Benedict J. Kerkvlieťs The Huk

Rebellion : A Study of Peasant Revolt in the Philippines (1977), and Vina A.

Lanzona's Amazons of the Huk Rebellion: Gender , Sex , and Revolution in the

Philippines (2009).

6. Martin Joseph Ponce suggests that Bulosan tempered his Popular Front poli-

tics - which, as Ponce notes, required him to excise critiques of US imperialism in the 1940s and 1950s from his works - with what Ponce calls "Bulosan's anti-

imperialist transnationalism" in his later work, which spoke to both Filipinos at

home and Filipino Americans (103-04).

7. Editor E. San Juan, Jr., emphasizes the unfinished condition of The Cry and the

Dedication with a note - "The manuscript breaks off here" - in three instances

(Bulosan, Cry 246, 262, 268). In addition, the manuscript's open-ended conclu-

sion leaves unanswered the question of whether or not Bulosan intended to con- tinue the narrative.

8. Many critics have suggested that both Dante and Rivas are stand-ins for Bulosan:

"Dante represents Bulosan's intellectual-writer alter ego, [and] Felix evokes his

activist-organizer side" (Ponce 107). 9. Ponce outlines the metaphorical stakes of Rivas's wound:

[Felix's wound] becomes the corporeal emblem by which he displays his rad-

ical credentials, assuring the underground that his suffering in the United

States results from his political organizing and furthers his radicalization, even

as his functional phallus ensures that identification take place through hetero-

sex. At another level, though, this seemingly arbitrary means of recognizing the

"real" Felix serves as a pretext for Bulosan to pursue a revaluation of sexual

practice that contests the sanctities of female virginity, sex within marriage,

and monogamy. (110)

10. In his introduction to The Cry and the Dedication , San Juan quotes a list of Bulosan's character sketches for the guerrilla band that seems drawn from

Taruc's work (xxii). The members' names correspond with guerrillas Taruc describes in Born of the People.

1 1. We might ask what affective communities Bulosan is interested in forming. In an

autobiographical essay written one year before he died, Bulosan explains "what

impelled [him] to write":

The answer is - my grand dream of equality among men and freedom for all.

To give a literate voice to the voiceless one hundred thousand Filipinos in the

United States, Hawaii, and Alaska. Above all and ultimately, to translate the

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Joyce

desires and aspirations of the whole Filipino people in the Philippines and

abroad in terms relevant to contemporary history. ("Autobiographical" 116)

As Bulosan's statement suggests, his writing, especially toward the end of his life,

deploys what Ponce calls "multivalent forms of address" (105), speaking to "the

internally colonized Filipinos in the US" (Libretti 138), "Filipinos in the Philippines" (Ponce 106), and the general leftist audience more explicitly targeted

by Bulosan's first novel, America Is in the Heart (Wald 302-03).

12. See San Juan's "Violence of Exile, Politics of Desire: Prologue to Carlos Bulosan"

(1996) and "Carlos Bulosan" (2008) for a gloss of current Bulosan scholarship. 13. Critical response to Bulosan's posthumous novel has generally read the text as a

narrative of "return," elaborating San Juan's argument that the novel is a "trans-

national allegory of a Third World imagination" (Introduction xix). Thus, for Tim

Libretti, Bulosan's novel is both a "psychotherapeutic discursive gesture of decol-

onization and disalienation for the collective consciousness of Filipinos in the US"

(138) and an attempt at "reconstructing] a national consciousness ... for Filipinos in the US disillusioned by the bankrupt promises of 'American' culture

and democracy" (139). Ponce takes this argument a step further, considering the

ways that Bulosan's novel connects the Filipino American struggle for rights with

the revolutionary anti-imperialist movement in the Philippines while, at the same

time, complicating both by bringing to light "the tensions and contradictions that

arise as Bulosan seeks to insert a diasporic voice . . . into the debates around

'national liberation' and political radicalism" (91).

14. Although Taruc is credited as the author of Born of the People , it was actually a

collaboration between Taruc and American Huk William J. Pomeroy. Pomeroy

admits as much in his own autobiography, The Forest: A Personal Record of

the Huk Guerrilla Struggle in the Philippines :

In the middle of 1947, while I was living in Manila as a freelance writer,

arrangements were made for me to go "outside" [the Huk euphemism for liv-

ing in a guerrilla camp] to collect first-hand material for a book about the

Huks

Instead of writing a history, I wrote his "autobiography," calling it Born of

the People

Filipino peasantry and the Filipino people in general, struggling to be wholly

free of colonialism

In the foreword to another biographical collaboration with Taruc, He Who Rides

the Tigery Douglas Hyde explains that Taruc felt that Born of the People "had . . . been 'worked over' by a colleague of the Politburo [Pomeroy or Communist Party leader José Lava] who in the process had written into it a cer-

tain amount of doctrinaire Marxism which did not exactly reflect Taruc's mind at

the time" (xiii). Taruc himself writes that portions of his book "were

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A Neatly Folded Hope

inserted . . . without [his] knowledge [by Lava] ... to make that book a vehicle of Bolshevik Communist propaganda (He 7).

15. Marilyn C. Alquizola and Lane Ryo Hirabayashi suggest that Bulosan supple-

mented Taruc's autobiography with a wide range of research material, from

"newspaper and magazine accounts" of the Huk Rebellion to "primary sources

that include personal correspondence and discussions with travelers" (38), at

least one of whom appears to be the white American Huk William J. Pomeroy.

16. Ponce also succinctly explicates the key difference between Taruc's and Bulosan's

novel: whereas Taruc by necessity argues for an "anti-imperialist nationalism,"

Bulosan expands this focus to an "anti-imperialist transnationalism" (104-05),

thus complicating and even critiquing the Huk struggle for national revolution. 17. As I have noted, Bulosan's work was unfinished at the time of his death.

Certainly, Bulosan's letters suggest that he imagined The Cry and the Dedication as part of a larger project. In a 1949 letter to Jose De Los Reyes,

Bulosan explains his desire to write "a 1,500 thousand page novel covering thirty-five years of Philippine history" and claims that he was working on a novel

"covering] 1915-1950" ( Sound 70-71). In another letter, Bulosan includes a bib-

liography that calls The Cry and the Dedication "an 800-page novel based on the

Huks [sic] movement" and mentions a separate series of "five novels centering

around the Filipino theme on the Pacific coast" (All 154-55). While Bulosan never

completed this series, he did repurpose one of the titles, All the Conspirators

(1998), for a thriller set in the Philippines after World War II. In their introduc-

tion to All the Conspirators , Caroline S. Hau and Benedict Anderson explain more

fully the complicated relationship between the novels Bulosan outlines in his let-

ter and the novels that have been discovered and published in the years since

Bulosan's death - namely, The Cry and the Dedication and All the Conspirators

(xi-xii) - and suggest that All the Conspirators offers a "somber flipside" and

"photonegative" of The Cry and the Dedication (xxiv).

18. This is not to suggest that Taruc shies away from outlining the violence inflicted on

the Filipino population. Taruc clearly points out "the open use of violence and terror

by the most reactionary section of the capitalists to maintain their rule" (Born 246),

which includes both "torture[s] and murder [s]" (136) committed by the Japanese

and the "orgy of killing, torture, burning, and looting that was let loose upon central

Luzon" (240) by the Philippine government, with United States military aid, after

the war. Although Taruc invokes an "orgy of killing" and repeatedly recounts the

murder, torture, burning, looting, and raping done by landlords and their govern-

ment proxies, rarely does he mention specific incidents of violence: in perhaps the

most graphic instances, he describes a Huk "beaten with a shovel by the Japanese"

(1 12) and a Huk who had "hot irons . . . thrust into his armpits and genitals." More

frequently, Taruc alludes to terrifying violence through generic terms rather than

explicit description as a way of referencing the collective violence suffered by the

"scores [of people] who met the same fate" (180). Thus, Taruc's autobiography

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Joyce

evacuates these terrifying encounters of affective resonance for the reader, instead

employing them as factual evidence supporting Marxist revolution.

19. The young poet is unnamed, but he is "dying of tuberculosis" (Bulosan, Cry 291),

a fact that connects him to Rivas, whom Dante has already explained was, in

1936, "for two years . . . sick with tuberculosis" (39), "dying in some hospital"

(40), and to Bulosan himself, who spent two years at Los Angeles General Hospital recovering from tuberculosis. According to the brief history he gives,

Dante was in Seattle in 1933, too early to conclude that the unnamed poet was

meant to be Rivas although it aligns with Bulosan's biography. The poet's argu-

ment with Dante mirrors Bulosan's wide-ranging concerns for the contradiction

inherent in the use of revolutionary violence throughout the novel.

Works Cited

Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.

Alquizola, Marilyn C., and Lane Ryo Hirabayashi. "Carlos Bulosan s Final Defiant Acts:

Achievements During the McCarthy Era." Amerasia Journal 38.3 (2012): 29-50. Print.

Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke UP, 2011. Print.

Brennan, Teresa. The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2004. Print.

Bulosan, Carlos. All the Conspirators. 1998. Seattle: U of Washington P, 2005. Print.

- . "Autobiographical Sketch." 1955. Bulosan, On Becoming Filipino 216. - . "CB to Jose De Los Reyes." [1950]. Bulosan, The Sound of Falling Light 73.

- . The Cry and the Dedication. Ed. E. San Juan, Jr. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1995. Print.

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