The Cry and the Dedication

by Carlos Bulosan, Epifanio San Juan Jr. (Editor)

Dramatizes the resourcefulness, cunning, and pain of the Filipino peasants' struggle against a heritage of colonization, first by Spain and later by the United States. This title is set during the political upheavals of the 1940s and 1950s.

Genres: Fiction

310 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Carlos Sampayan Bulosan was a Filipino American novelist and poet best-known for the semi-autobiographical America is in the Heart.

Reviews

[sdw · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is my favorite Bulosan novel. The Cry and The Dedication was one of the last works of Bulosan’s and was published decades after his death. In it, Bulosan vicariously returns to the Philippines to participate in armed revolution (Bulosan never did make it back to the Philippines). The book looks at the Huk Rebellion in the postwar war era. These guerilla fighters originally struggled against the Japanese invasion and after the war continued to struggle against U.S. dominance. In the story, the experiences of Carlos in America is In the Heart are split between the character Dante and the character Felix Rivas. Dante, a Filipino who spent many years in America becoming a famous writer who published a book of folk tales placed in the Philippines, joins 6 other revolutionaries on a mission to find Felix, recently returned from America who has instructions on getting material support for their struggle. Only Dante can recognize Felix, as they knew each other in the U.S. For unapparent reasons, they must visit each of the revolutionaries’ home towns on their trek. One revolutionary is a woman. She serves to further illustrate the text’s “Eliotic theme of sexual wounding” (to quote my father) and as representative of the Philippines’ scarred and potentially barren landscape (my reading). The ways in which descriptions of gender, sexuality, and nature function in the text leave much to be discussed, and I would not describe them as particularly progressive. The book is really well written and raises a lot of question. I

f you read this book, you should come over for dinner and have a conversation with me about it. It’s the kind of book I really want to discuss. Its rich and an enjoyable read. Oh! And the introduction by E. San Juan Jr is magnificent.

[David Arthur · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like Dante's Inferno, a crew of guerillas, walks about Luzon, sometime during the independence era, at war with the neocolonialist Philippines, the treachery of the government which only pretends to want peace, its police and priests, Rizal was probably right, despite what a certain hispanista might say. A group of, probably Huk insurgents gathered from many villages and towns, prematurely old you and wizened young men, old men, and a young woman. Their journey is amid an environment of crops and rain, upon a fertile earth, tended by the hands of the ever suffering peasant families from which the guerillas, and their enemies have sprung. The peasants live in the world where they strive to work, live, and reproduce, under the heals of police, military, the church, and the influence of American power, through the wealthy compradors who have preserved their privilege regardless of which colonial power is ruling. But, to be clear their own worse enemies are their fellow Filipinos.
Not so unlike the wheat land of southern California, amid remnants of the Catholic hacienda, of Frank Norris's "The Octopus: A Story of California, as the independent ranchers are doomed to demise, economic and mortally before the economic forces of the railroad, sustained by the government, in service of power and capitalist forces of change, so here Bulosan describes, not as "America is at the Heart" sort of immigrant to America, an alter ego, Dante, one of the insurgents who dies at his brother's hand, as he causes the death of that brother, "a landlord and the priest" (How right was Rizal of the social cancer!). At his death, Bulosan was a man with a divided heart, what if he had become an insurgent? A few parts of the novel are forever incomplete, but as it stands, it is a document on the other side of his life, and is a dedication above his grave.
In "The Cry and the Dedication" by Carlos Bulosan edited and with an introduction by E. San Juan, Jr., 1995, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, I conclude my review with some dialogue by Dante, whose mission of meeting an American collaborator, is compromised by death, after confronting his brother, the landlord and a priest!
"'Yes this is my hometown'...
'A landlord and a priest,' he answered Old Bio.
'What luck!' Dabu exclaimed. he meant it negatively, for he had an aversion to priests. He had seen his mother bruising her bare knees on the cobblestones of churches. And remembering his mother, he repeated, 'What luck!'
'That is what you get when you come from an educated family whose members know how to get along with the powers that be, some of them anyway, because there is always one in every such a family that revolts against the others, against compromises, against authority. I am one of those who revolt, as you already know.'
'You don't have to tell me, Dante.' Linda Bie interrupted. 'I came from that kind of family...I have revolted.'
....[Confronting his brother, Father Bustamante, a priest who fusses over his stash of gold, and his power, Dante responds to verbal confrontation]
'Yes, that's what I can show as passion for the Lord,' Dante said. 'That's passionate marriage of your soul to Christ. What has happened? Of course you are now a politician, and a landlord, and a priest. You have gone far since the days when you ate snails and periwinkles from the river, father Bustamante. Yes, indeed,'
...'I came to tell you that in the name of Christ you are a bastard.'
Thus the female earth persists, and life goes on, forces of nature, including religious, economic, political, and military, continue to bedevil, in this land of the Filipino peoples, as devils, real ones: humans, pester those who tend that life giving soil, and continue cultures guided, at its base by the female impulse, but colonized by the dueling male impulses of conquest versus liberation. Perhaps, thus so, is most of humankind, in struggle and torment.