Joseph Scalice

Patricio N. Abinales, Love, Sex and the Filipino Communist or Hinggil sa Pagpipigil ng Panggigigil (Manila: Anvil, 2004).

The temptation, of course, is to call Jojo Abinales’ recent book ‘penetrating,’ and to follow up the declaration with an untranslated Tagalog interjection such as “talaga eh.” Love, Sex and the Filipino Communist, whatever its faults may be, is not a dull read. It is at times uproariously funny and, with the exception of the introduction by Robert Francis Garcia, feels in some indefinable way to be genuinely Filipino in its style and use of language.

Abinales analyses the three official party documents on sexual relations within the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP): the English On the Relation of Sexes, and the two Tagalog documents, Hinggil sa Pag-aasawa and Mga Gabay at Tuntunin sa Pag-aasawa – the texts of which he includes as appendices. Using the literature produced by party cadres and unabridged interviews with several party members, Abinales examines the strange, quirky, and utterly conservative policy of the CPP on sex and gender relations.

The book reads more like a compilation of useful primary sources than it does as a historical account of the significance of these primary sources. Depending on the interests of the reader, this is at once the book’s potential strength and potential weakness. I would prefer to view this as the book’s strength. The lengthy transcribed interview with Sunny/Nikki Lansang was a particular delight. Rather than cite portions of this interview to support an argument about the nature of the Communist Party or to explain why it pursued such conservative sexual politics, Abinales lets the interview stand on its own. Much of what we learn from the interview pertains only indirectly to the topic the Abinales is addressing and yet is imminently useful for understanding the history of the Communist Party – machismo and the Kintanar assassination (78), the role of theory in debates (79), and the delightful reduction of democratic centralism to a verb (na-demcen, 70) meaning to be suppressed.

Having thus argued for the book’s strength as a source of primary material, it must be said that the book cannot stand on its own as an account of sexual relations or gender in Philippine Communist politics, and if this was its aim it has not succeeded. There is no coherent argument, and what I have portrayed as the useful retention of primary material could easily be depicted as the careless juxtaposition of vignettes and paronomasia. The concluding comparative arguments that Abinales makes, the comparisons with Catholicism and with other Communist movements, are unconvincing in their selectiveness and brevity.

The question of audience is a pertinent one. To whom is this book with its lengthy sections of untranslated Tagalog and insider Philippine Communist allusions addressed? A very limited one it seems. The book needs a reader who can sing along with the Apo Hiking Society tune on the frontispiece (Syota ng Iba), who can identify KT-KS and LU and their significance, and who has a close familiarity with the history of the Communist Party of the Philippines and its personalities. Could translation and explanatory notes have extended the usefulness of this work? I am not certain. Perhaps the book is nothing more (and nothing less!) than a delightful extended insider’s joke, a scholarly pointing of the finger at something that has long both frustrated and amused those in the know.

I will cite a single instance of this insider joking: the reddish tinted photo on the cover. It is a picture of Fernando Poe (Sr.!) and Milla del Sol from the classic 1939 LVN pictures production Giliw Ko! – a movie long since forgotten by all but the most ardent Tagalog movie aficionados. Milla del Sol, one of the most charming on-screen personalities in Philippine cinematic history, represents in the movie the conservative Maria Clara stereotype that is bemoaned by Philippine feminists in Abinales book, yet in her adamant refusal to sing on the radio in English has been hailed as the first radical nationalist in Filipino movies.

In conclusion, I would have to say that I greatly enjoyed the book – perhaps against my better sensibilities as an historian. I have seldom chuckled quite as much this semester as I did over this book. It is pleasant to know that I come from a country where a strange configuration of politics and sexuality means that I may very well someday meet a man named Lin Biao de Dios. (96)