A Feminist Reading of "The Summer Solstice" by Nick Joaquin

The Tadtarin

An Application of Harraway, Gunn Allen, and Spivak 

on “The Summer Solstice” by Nick Joaquin

Nick Joaquin’s The Summer Solstice is one of the most acclaimed works in Philippine Literature. It is St. John’s Day. Dona Lupeng, her husband Don Paeng, and her children are all set to go to their grandfather’s house. Dona Lupeng starts looking for their cook, Amada. She finds Entoy, Amada’s husband, and asks him if he was beating Amada again. Entoy claims he has not laid a finger on her. Dona Lupeng then goes to their servant’s quarters and finds Amada in a compromising position across the bed. Dona Lupeng finds out that Amada attended the Tatarin or “Tadtarin” rites (a fertility rite) the night before and that Entoy claimed that Amada is the Tadtarin herself.  On the carriage, they pass by a St. John’s parade and Dona Lupeng is unimpressed, thinking that it is a “display of manly arrogance”.

Finally, they arrive at their grandfather’s house. Dona Lupeng meets Guido, Don Paeng’s cousin who had just arrived from Europe. He tells Dona Lupeng that women should be adored and proceeds to kiss Dona Lupeng feet. This makes Dona Lupeng feel embarrassed and uncomfortable, still, it stirred up something inside her. Later that night, Dona Lupeng asks Don Paeng to accompany her to the Tadtarin. Don Paeng was hesitant at first, but then agrees to accompany her. When they finally reach the plaza, Dom Paeng is outraged by the horde of “prancing, screaming, writhing women” that he forces Dona Lupeng that they should head home. Finally back in their home, Dona Lupeng “makes Don Paeng say that he adores her and tells him to kiss her feet. Don Paeng is resistant at first, but he submits in the end (Salonga, 2006).

Overall, it is intended to be the story of the triumph of women over men. However, for this essay, I will attempt to apply the arguments of Harraway, Allen, and Spivak to The Summer Solstice.

In “A Manifesto for Cyborgs”, Donna Harraway talks about the cyborg identity, how people are, metaphorically ----- a combination of human and machine, how the world must be without gender and dualisms, and how the cyborg should be people’s very being. In Joaquin’s The Summer Solstice, however, I find that Philippine culture is a cyborg in itself.

First, the short story was specifically set in the 1850s, Philippine culture caught between the transition period of a “predominantly Hispanic country to an American one” (Salonga, 2006); thus showing how Philippine culture, or any other national culture for that matter, is a combination of various traditions. In the case of the Philippines, it is now made up of pre-Hispanic, Hispanic, American (and eventually, Japanese) cultures.   Secondly, the Tadtarin was a 3-day fertility ritual involving women, and in the story, the last day of the festival coincided with St. John’s Day which also happens to be a male fertility ritual. Taking Harraway’s argument for fractured identities, this juxtaposition between the

Tadtarin and the St. John’s Day talks about the Filipino identity, specifically, how Filipino culture is defined by both “pagan” and “Christian” beliefs.  

Applying Harraway’s fractured identities to The Summer Solstice is quite clear cut. Applying Paula Gunn Allen’s argument for tribal - feminism, however, is quite tricky for me. First, The Summer Solstice is not a folk tale. By this, I mean that the story is not written during its intended time, nor is it a tale told by the people’s (tribe’s) lived experience. However, Nick Joaquin (as an “observer”) wrote the story with an already intended “agenda”, specifically a feminist one. Thus, a feminist interpretation is most appropriate.

In line with the feminist interpretation, Gunn Allen further argues that “when patriarchal paradigms are applied to gynocentric tribal modes, it transforms the ideas, significances … into something incongruent to their [tribal] philosophies or theories”. This is exemplified by Joaquin’s The Summer Solstice through the resistance of paganism (the gynocentric tribal tradition, Tadtarin) on Christianity (the patriarchal St. John’s Day) and the character transformations or developments of Dona Lupeng and Don Paeng.

However, there are numerous criticisms to The Summer Solstice. Some argued that the feminist attempt in the story was “pseudo-feminism” wherein the women in the story were not given any “long – term power” but an “illusory one”, wherein they only acquire it during the summer solstice which only occurs once a year. Furthermore, the imagery used to describe women’s power in the story were said to be some “dark, unexplainable mystery”; thus, implying that the power of women bordered on the demonic and sexual (Salonga, 2006).  This goes on to show the importance of Gunn Allen’s three approaches to interpretation.

This leads us to Gayatri Spivak’s argument on postcolonial reason. Spivak claims that the “truth is constructed” wherein one may inflict harm on others or the subalterns through discourse. The subalterns are not simply those who are “oppressed”, rather, they are the people who were “structurally written out of the capitalist narrative. In postcolonial terms”, they are those who have “no access to cultural imperialism” (Schwenz, 2018). The real problem, however, is how the “observer” interprets the “subaltern’s” experiences. For Spivak, the problem is cyclical because educating the subaltern is equivalent to teaching them “our” patterns of thinking, thus the subaltern’s interpretations of their own experiences is already influenced by our constructed narratives. In the Philippine context, examples that come to mind may include indigenous people and tribal cultures in the country.

For me, however, the real problem is the label itself. Why call them subaltern? Why call them pagans or indios? Is it because they are “uncivilized” in Christianity’s standards? Who says Christianity is the moral and social standard anyway? Why are dominant narratives accepted as truth? This may go on and on, but for me, these “labels” make way for discrimination, then prejudice, and ultimately, stereotypes. Even worse, these stereotypes may affect how the “educated elite” understand the experiences of the “subaltern”; and this is exactly what happened with Spivak's Bhubaneswari Bhaduri. We can only hope that this won’t happen to future interpretations of The Summer Solstice, or better yet, to the stories of our indigenous people.

References

Salonga, A. (2006). Representing Men’s and Women’s Speech: A Linguistic Analysis of Nick Joaquin’s

“The Summer Solstice”. Journal of English Studies and Comparative Literature. 9(1), Retrieved from: http://journals.upd.edu.ph/index.php/jescl/article/view/293/279 on 22 October, 2018

Schwenz, C.L. (2018). Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty – Postcolonial Studies. Retrieved from: https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/postcolonialstudies/2014/06/19/spivak-gayatri-chakravorty/on 22 October, 2018