WHY is it when people think of blood, they often view it through a masculine lens? Take influential American novelist Ernest Hemingway, who once declared that “there is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
In his piece “Ernest Hemingway: The man behind the cultivated image of hypermasculinity,” journalist Matthew Adams wrote that the iconic author of A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises — whom he described as “the macho face of 20th-century prose” — “wanted to dissociate literature from the taint of femininity.”
This is evident in his stories, which were certified testosterone extravaganzas. “Lilies and wallpaper were finished. In their place? Blood, battle, sex, hunts, death,” Adams observed.
But, perhaps, Hemingway forgot that women are used to blood. In fact, there’s a period in our lives when we literally see blood every month. That said, women writers are arguably well-versed in “bleeding,” be it in their stories or in their realities.
In Blood: collected stories (Ethos Books; 240 pages; 2015), Noelle Q. de Jesus shatters the notion that women’s stories are not as powerful as “macho” ones. The author has a good selection of stories that are practically screaming, “Hold my beer and shut the hell up, Papa!” After all, women don’t need to go out to fight their battles. For many of them, home is where the bloody battlefield is.
The title story — which won a Palanca award in 1995 — discusses a subject that few stereotypical “macho” men would be brave enough to discuss: menstruation. It is narrated by Anne Marie “Anna” Edwards, an 11-year-old girl living with her Filipino mother and American father and three siblings in a typical middle-class home in the US.
Anna’s parents seem to be going through a rough patch in their marriage and her mother’s daily debacle with teenage sister Sheila doesn’t help. Anna is undoubtedly on Team Mom. The way she sees her mom confirms this: “Mommy is beautiful with long and very black hair that reaches down to her hips,” she shares. “Her skin is forever smooth and brown as milk chocolate.”
Sadly, though, Anna’s mother — despite fiercely holding on to Filipino traditions and superstitious beliefs — doesn’t seem to be comfortable in her own skin. Reacting to her mom’s insecurity over her nose, Anna muses: “Mommy’s nose is not as bad as she makes out. It’s round and a little flat maybe, but it isn’t ugly.”
The turning point comes when Anna gets her period for the first time. She is told by her mother about a peculiar Filipino custom that involves smearing her “first blood” on her face. As expected, the very thought of it makes Anna cringe and she refuses to do it — until after her loyalty is questioned.
De Jesus boldly confronts the seemingly “small” things that we pretend don’t disturb us. In “Equivalents,” a woman named Cara is startled when her husband Joel declares, “I want to make love to you.” It’s because it seems foreign to her: “The instant she hears his words, they strike her as comical and absurd. They are American words, delivered in Joel’s new curly voice. Beneath the blankets, the whispered phrase, in a breath warm and moist on her face, kills her. Mirth bubbles up inside, swelling up her cheeks. She purses her lips and holds on, but it’s no use. A snort escapes her, and Cara explodes with it. Joel jerks his head away to avoid the blast, and their blanket shelter collapses.”
Another story, “Passport” — told in the voice of a domestic helper — highlights a variant in the age-old tale of the things that people do for love. In this case, the woman steals a passport from her employer’s house guest.
“So I lied to you,” she states in her soliloquy. “I looked you in the eyes, and told you that nothing had come. The mailbox was empty except for bills. I acted surprised and sympathized with you as I played with your daughter. And in her eyes, I saw mine. Maybe they had not sent it yet, I said, or perhaps, it is lost in the mail. All that time it was in my room, beneath my mattress. People will take it. They will change the name. Change the photo. And then my daughter can come. Wasn’t I able to come here in just the same way?”
Hopefully, this story manages to enlighten xenophobes who think all illegals are drug traffickers or terrorists who want to take away their jobs. A domestic helper with a tampered passport is hardly Pablo Escobar or El Chapo.
The collection contains 25 stories and most of them feature intimate or familial connections. One of them, however — “Mirage” — stands out because it is set in post-apocalyptic Singapore and it’s told in the voice of Kelvin, who is doing his best to care for his Gong Gong (the Mandarin term for “maternal grandfather”).
“Even now at the edge of this country now known as Spore, on the jagged River Valley Coast, it was hot with a terrible intensity,” Kelvin reports. “Yes, even here in the double row of waterway homes where Gong Gong and I were sent to live at the beginning of the Transition, once all those who were sick and ailing had already died, and the fittest emerged. We, and the few other small families like ours with TSCs (Triple Senior Citizens) from the Golden Age, many of us were just two-person family units.”
If you’re looking for feel-good stories, Blood isn’t the book to reach for. You will get hurt. However, if you want to go beneath the surface and are sure that you can handle the dissection of despair’s many torturous configurations, then this collection of tales is for you. At the very least, they’ll remind you that the perfect pictures that people present to the world never tell the whole story.
Blood: collected stories costs P495 and is available in leading bookstores.
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