Balinese dancer wearing a gas mask: climate change and the tropical imaginary

On the Weariness of Time: El Niño in the Philippines

“…I hope to propose this gesture of "coincidental" reading as a counter/reaction to the discipline of "comparative" reading whose juxtapositions are often hinged primarily on spatial differences, in contrast to the present attention to the temporal. 4 While Lundberg (2021) articulates the tropical imaginary in relation to climate change through creative production, particularly in the works of the Indonesian artist Slinat, I rehearse here the same "material poetics" (p. 98 ; see also Lundberg, 2008) through a materialist reading-a belabouring that is as much a creative production-that coincides Lacaba's poem with what initially appears to be an historically distinct, if not completely separate, event, namely the Philippine drought of 2015. In doing so, a certain predicament on time is intimatedwhat Nixon (2011) calls an "attritional catastrophe," or that which "overspill[s] clear boundaries in time and space…that simplif[ies] violence and underestimate[s]…the human and environmental costs…smooth[ing] the way for amnesia…" (p.7).…”

“…Here, the pronoun is translated as they to retain the gender fluidity of the farmer portrayed. At the same time, in The phenomenon of the present climate emergency calls for a timely "tropical imaginary" (Lundberg, 2021) that coincides 3 Jose F. Lacaba's early sonnet from 1965 with the contemporary predicament of Filipino rural farmers. 4 In 2015, fifty years after Lacaba's poem was first published, many parts of the country experienced a drought similar to the one described in the poem which affected the lives of countless farmers (Ranada, 2015).…”

“…In doing so, a certain predicament on time is intimatedwhat Nixon (2011) calls an "attritional catastrophe," or that which "overspill[s] clear boundaries in time and space…that simplif[ies] violence and underestimate[s]…the human and environmental costs…smooth[ing] the way for amnesia…" (p.7). In this rehearsal of tropical imagining, I propose as well a reversal of the rhetoric flow described by Lundberg (2021), through bringing the discourse on climate change this time from "the specific, artistic and local," as concretized by Lacaba's poem, and back to the "general, scientific and global," as embodied in the juxtaposed Philippine historical moment (p.98). eTropic 20.2 (2021) Special Issue: Tropical Imaginaries and Climate Crisis eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the tropics ultimately embody the Philippine notion of time in its etymological sense: panahon, from the obscure root nahon, which denotes adaptive labouring that entails a conscious turn to the most timely approach, including the possible movement to an entirely different place (Benitez, 2019b, pp.…”