an essay about the recent Philippine election, Syjuco lamented how invented truths now matter more in domestic politics than fact-checked journalism.)
Vita harbors none of the illusions her ghostwriter struggles with. When Syjuco secretly begins interviewing her ex-lovers, she warns him: “They’ll each try to change your mind, but at some point you’ll need to take a stance and say: this is what I believe is true, and right, and my role in this. Because you know the world can’t stand a free woman. It makes her pay; takes her story, all she earns, because it can.” She may be lying as well, but it’s all for the greater good, she believes. Vita lies sincerely, President Estregan says, which he knows because he does too: “I also tell the truth even when I am lying.”
The pleasures of reading I Was the President’s Mistress!! are double for anyone familiar with Philippine politics. Syjuco recycles some of the most notorious episodes and figures from the country’s recent history for comic or horrifying effect. The president is a facsimile of Rodrigo Duterte defending a drug war that leaves people, their heads bound in packing tape, dead on the streets. (Vita claims she loved Estregan, wielding her naivete as a shield against complicity.) Duterte is only the most obvious parallel, but there are others buried in the text like Easter eggs: The erstwhile human rights lawyer turned Duterte spokesman Harry Roque makes a cameo as Hari Pukeh, and the neck brace worn by former president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who mysteriously developed a spinal condition that meant she had to stay in the hospital, not jail, for the duration of her corruption trial, becomes a prop for Estregan as impeachment looms.
Not everything fits, though. Shortly before he double-crosses the president, Estregan’s right-hand man declares, “That’s why I dig Vita’s bombshell explosions. Her clandestine recordings remind me of the tapes made by the dictator’s own lovey-dovey, which plunged him into hot water with the wily Iron Buttercunt.” (The dictator being Ferdinand Marcos; the disgruntled spouse, Imelda.) By spinning actual events through his imagination, Syjuco threads his fictional world with facts so that the novel teeters between satire and grim realism. But the tone is sometimes uneven, and the writing can feel strained, with the characters seemingly trying to compete with the real people who inspired them.
I Was the President’s Mistress!! is stuffed with ideas about celebrity, corruption, and the power structures that scaffold political and personal lives. But Syjuco’s writing is more persuasive on a smaller scale. He makes Vita’s eclectic taste in men cohere because he writes well on how a casual glance can be transformed into desire. Discussing how she traded in one lover for another, Vita explains: “I should’ve known—that entitled jerk, from day one, walking right up after the Metallica concert, despite One-Mig beside me the whole time, nodding to the music like someone trying not to disagree. Cat had caught me staring—as he headbanged by the stage, bathed in red light, his hair swirling like blood in water.”
The best parts of I Was the President’s Mistress!! are often about life in Manila and how the city’s unprepossessing exterior exudes its own kind of charm: “The unnamed streets, cinder-block walls, bricks on iron roofs, bare bulbs like blisters, obelisks of rebar, laundry hanged like flags of beggarly kingdoms.” Or darker and blunter, from another character: “Get in that lane, mate. Buses stop here higgledy-piggledy. We’ll be stuck for hours. I once saw one hit a cyclist then back over him. Funerals cost less than hospitals.” As Adam Mars-Jones observed in his review of Ilustrado, Syjuco is a talented writer of place—Crispin Salvador would have been proud.
There are shards of ethnography, too. No character, no matter how self-delusional or how briefly they appear, is reduced to a type, because Syjuco shows how the coordinates of their life—being from the capital or a small town, being a power broker or a pawn in someone else’s war—determine who they are. Vita on her mother: “Single mom, working by day in the air base canteen, by night our community’s seamstress, all the neighbors treating us with such respect (they had to: she knew their measurements).” Or her first love, Loy, describing the uncle who raised him, an illicit community organizer and bet collector for an illegal numbers game. He ends up dead, shot in his home when the mayor’s son takes over and turns on the men who’d helped his father. It’s not a fate that anyone deserves, but especially not a man like his uncle, Loy says: “Not always a good man but always doing one more good thing than bad.”
This chorus of voices gives the novel its texture. Prose that is prolix here turns spiky there. Syjuco shares a fondness for the polyphonic novel with other writers of Filipino heritage. Gina Apostol wove together three stories—each a version of an actual historical event, the Balangiga massacre of 1901—in Insurrecto; her narrative technique was a political choice, a way of writing against the biased archive of the colonial past. And there is Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters, recently reissued on the 30th anniversary of its publication and reviewed by Deborah Eisenberg, who praised its kaleidoscopic structure for revealing a “map of social relations that expresses the inner logic of the president’s regime and the vast, stinging reach of authoritarianism.”
One reason for the similarity may be that Syjuco, Apostol, and Hagedorn write about the Philippines from abroad, with all the advantages and disadvantages that entails. While none are true exiles in the sense of being unable to return, and while their books are stylistically and thematically distinct, the fact that all three have produced polyphonic novels suggests there is something in the experience of displacement that lends itself to this form. Hagedorn, in an interview with The Nation, explained how she began making trips back to the Philippines to develop ideas for Dogeaters. The narrative technique she used can be read as a mirror for her own experience of rediscovering a place she had left through the accounts of multiple others, those she had left behind.
As Edward Said wrote of the fraught responsibilities of exiled writers: “You must leave the modest refuge provided by subjectivity and resort instead to the abstractions of mass politics.” A novel written in the voice not of one but of many is a compromise between those extremes.
