This article proposes the vernacular as a discursive methodological entry point to Memory Studies. A bottom-up approach, this article theorizes memory and time starting from a close-reading of signifiers from the Filipino language, thus allowing its culture to be considered in its own terms first. The first part of the essay examines a set of terms that show equivalences with Western conceptions of memory. The second set of signifiers—( ma)tandà(an), agam, limot/limót and panahon—reveal that they are actually more illustrative of the current trend of movement in Memory Studies; and that they translate more accurately both the non-linear and linear dimensions of time. The third part of the article considers cultural concepts namely, kapwa, utang-na-loob, bayanihan, Manilaner, and desaparesidos, which challenge and enrich Trauma Studies’ Freudian and Holocaust-based history. With a perspective of memory and time from the Global South, this study also demonstrates how one can share space and time with (the wrath of) nature in a society of impunity while emphasising the importance of spirituality, humour, group culture, and hospitality. The existence of the Manilaners and the desaparecidos also shifts the perspective and experience of the Holocaust and the disappeared to a Filipino context.
After interrogating the (non-)referential status of the Holocaust for Asians, this essay examines Frank Ephraim's Escape to Manila and Juergen Goldhagen's Manila Memories. In particular, cross-traumatic affiliation is studied between two groups of people: the Manilaner and the Manileños: the former were Europeans who fled Nazism and sought refuge in Manila; the latter were Filipino residents of Manila who, during the Second World War, found themselves under Japanese Occupation. A closer reading of the memoirs, however, also reveals latent orientalism in the portrayal of Filipinos. This essay thus echoes present postcolonial concerns in recent Trauma Studies research which ask the place of serial colonisations, martial law, climate catastrophes and the sacred in Trauma theory.
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