Carlos Bulosan
Carlos Bulosan is one of the most widely read
and highly regarded Filipino American authors because of
his seminal America is on the Heart, an autobiographical work which reads
like a novel. The book is about his life as a expatriate laborer in America
in the 1920s. I've read it
about five years
ago and again this year (1997), and I am still horrified by the
treatment of the manongs by white America.
What stuck in my mind, for example, was the scene Bulosan described wherein they
were chased by
white
men into the forest and one of them was caught - he was tied to a tree, naked.
The white
men simply wanted to see why Filipinos were sought after by white women.
These books by Bulosan are available:
The Cry and the Dedication is a posthumously discovered novel by Carlos Bulosan. From
the book cover: "Bulosan was previously recognized as a prophetic writer, an artisan of
lush and evocative prose who felicitously blended traditional class struggle and anti-racist
tradtions of the 1930s with post-World War II themes of national liberation in the
colonized world. But the appearance of this nearly 'lost' novel of guerilla warfare
in the Philippines extends his achievement in fresh and unexpected ways. With
Dantesque journey motif and Eliotic theme of sexual wounding, The Cry and the Dedication
recalls works as diverse as Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls and Kenneth
Patchen's The Journal of Albion Moonlight, at the same time as it bears the marks
of Philippine national culture.
"Written against the descending night of the McCarthyite witch-hunt The Cry and the
Dedication is a haunting allegory of search, struggle and redemption. It is high
testimony to the power of the revolutionary imagination when empowered by the exile's
dream of personal return and liberation of the homeland." - Alan Wald, University
of Michigan"
Other related items:
- On Becoming Filipino: Selected Writings of Carlos Bulosan edited by E. San Juan Jr. -
Ordering Information.
