Temporality in Nick Joaquin’s The Woman Who Had Two Navels

Abstract

Nick Joaquin has been read as nostalgic of Filipino Hispanic culture. While it's true that most of Joaquin's works deal with the country's Hispanic past, his works account for more than just nostalgia. A lot of studies that make use of postcolonial theory show how this Filipino Hispanic culture as depicted in Joaquin's works can be construed as a form of resistance against US neocolonialism, on one hand, and nativist nationalism, on another. Using postcolonial and narrative theories, this paper argues that Joaquin's The Woman Who Had Two Navels should also be read as a strategy for resisting US neocolonialism and a critical view of nativism, shedding light on the disjunction among history, culture, and literary consciousness.

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“…Arong (2016) in her essay "Nick Joaquin's Cándido's Apocalypse: Re-imagining the Gothic in a Postcolonial Philippines" explored the idea of the Gothic in Joaquin's writing and claimed that Joaquin is the "most original voice in postcolonial Philippine writing" (p. 114). Arong's (2018) more recent paper "Temporality in Nick Joaquin's The Woman Who Had Two Navels" argued as well that Joaquin's novel "should also be read as a strategy for resisting U.S. neocolonialism and a critical view of nativism, shedding light on the disjunction among history, culture, and literary consciousness" (p. 455). P. Sharrad (2008) examines Joaquin's works contrasted to the history specifically, and in accordance with the history of the Philippines.…”