Wicked Stories from a Witch of a Writer

For a clear lack of something better to post now, below is a slightly revised version of a book review I wrote, which was first published in the May 31, 2004 issue of The Philippine Graphic. Later that year, this book earned (with Rosario Cruz Lucero's Feast and Famine: Stories of Negros and Vicente Garcia Groyon's The Sky Over Dimas) the National Book Award for Fiction.

Title: Daisy Nueve: Stories Weird, Wonderful, Whatever (2003)
Author: Menchu Aquino Sarmiento
Publisher: Anvil Publishing

Most stories tend to invite readers to come and watch how the challenges or circumstances their characters confront change them, and they do so calmly, softly. But with the ten stories Menchu Aquino Sarmiento gathers in the startling Daisy Nueve: Stories Weird, Wonderful, Whatever, that invitation turns into a challenge. One may read them and find pleasure in the pain the cha­r­acters feel or find comedy in the cruel circumstances they are compelled to cope with. That’s astounding, and so’s the way Sarmiento renders them with a cynical eye.

Oddballs and outsiders dominate the stories, like the troubled title character with a very depres­sing and dysfunctional homelife in “When Ben was Ben.” How troubled? Consider this passage: “He placed the family of rag dolls in the Tonka dump truck, and made them fall out. He ran ov­er them again and again: on their limbs, faces, backs, necks. Each time the truck’s rubber wheels make scrunching noises on the dolls’ stuffing which was probably made of beans, Ben repeated like a magical incantation: 'Now you’re dead, dead, dead.'”

Loreta de Dios, the pathetic schoolgirl in “The Frog Princess,” is also an outsider, and Sarmiento shows the reader how she turned out that way, and she does so quite objectively, without much sentiment. It turns out she became one very early on: “When the bell rang for recess, all the Kin­dergarten classes knew: Loreta de Dios had made poo-poo in her panty during Miss Battung’s class. The news was greeted with excited squeals of shock and delight. Then with the spontaneity of a flash flood or a brush fire, a chant grew and spread through the throng of little girls: `Lo­reta eh-tat! Loreta eh-tat!’” Children can be cruel, even at the age.

Not all the characters in Daisy Nueve are like them, though. There’s the distressed and disap­pointed daughter in “When They Were Cool,” for one. The reason for her dismay? It seems that her dear Daddy has a young mistress, and Sarmiento renders this information with cutting humor: “That’s why it was such a letdown for me to find out that Dad was having an affair with a girl from his office named Teena. Teena—that’s how she spelled it. Isn’t that just too cute? I im­a­gine that her little friends must be named Trixee, Cheree, and Peechee. You know the kind. You see them all over in Makati. Some specialize in foreigners.”

And then there’s the condescending business executive whose life takes an unexpected turn one night in “Zechariah in the Gloaming.” The story shows how much he belittles his colleagues du­ring a corporate bash: “What fools these corporate drones be! They parroted the words like little children, pidgin speakers experimenting with grownup speech. What pretenders they were des­perately trying to be proactive, and interactive, interfacing paradigms, merging synergistically-- what a lot of crap all of it was!” Strong words from a fellow pretender.

None of the stories in the book, though, could compare with “Good Intentions 101: SY `72-`73.” Here’s a story set during Martial Law, and here Sarmiento’s bitter humor and dark vision are at its strongest. Using the third-person point of view of a 14-year-old middle-class girl, the story shows the hilarity and the horror of that awful time. Like when a busload of high-school students went on a field trip to a filthy palengke for study, only to have the insulted vendors throw market garbage at them, staining their oh-so-clean clothes. Like when the milita­ry arrested an innocent Engineering student, whom they mistook for a Huk commander (!), and tortured him before releasing him. It’s a perceptive, remarkable story. Local literature textbooks should anthologize this story one day.

These stories, and the rest of the stories in the collection, don’t exactly make for comfortable and easy reading. That fact is clear at every page: the characters are hardly sympathetic, and any hope for improvement in their lives or relief from their anguish appears very slim. The language is so sharp, it could almost slice; and the cynical humor pierces the gut as much, if not more, as it hits the funny bone. Some may find all this off-putting.

Still, the stories work, and astoundingly, for just about those exact qualities. The way Sarmiento sees the world with a sharp, stern eye, always steady and never flinching, without a hint of illusion or romance; the way she uses language to instill her bleak vision into her troubling stories; the way she deftly handles different points of view and tones—they allow her to stand out from most Filipino writers. The risks she took in her stories are great; fortunately, they pay off. She is sort of like Jessica Zafra in her fictionist mode, but better, edgier.

As a writer, Sarmiento is a witch: she wields great magic, but that magic is dark, hardly comfor­ting. She concocts stories with it, fraught with irony, coupling humor with horror, pleasure with pain. The effect is wicked, but in a good way. That’s quite a feat, and quite uncommon. For that, she’s a unique and undeniably fascinating fictionist, and Daisy Nueve: Stories Weird, Wonderful, Whatever is a unique and ultimately worthwhile book. (Copyright © 2004 by A.I.D.)