Author ORCID Identifier
0000-0002-0654-1698
Abstract
This essay considers a moment in José Rizal’s novel El Filibusterismo (1891)—namely, the substitution of the Spanish figure of “black King Melchor” with the folk “King of the Indios,” Bernardo Carpio, in the eyes of a native coachman—with a critical attention to how such an instant of comparison unfolds. The essay first ruminates on the crucial phrase deployed by Rizal to signify the moment, pensar naturalmente, which has been interpreted differently across various translations of the novel, but specifically rendered here as alaála or remembering. Through a brief philological examination of the latter Filipino word, regarding it as a material discursive entry point, the essay then attempts to offer a vernacular conception of memory, one that is tropic in the sense that it “turns”: not simply recollecting of relations to the past, however anachronistic such a recalling might be; but simultaneously “remembering” of certain futures, as configured by the material present. Moreover, in underscoring the role of nonhuman matters in this kind of mnemonic rehearsal, alaála is proposed to be tropical as well, precisely because it emerges from and relates to this particular worldly zone, an active agent that compels epistemology and ontology to constantly rework one another, even and especially in “human” memory. Ultimately, what is being evoked here is an intuition of human memory as, in fact, not quite human, as it is always already entangled with the nonhuman world.
Recommended Citation
Benitez, Christian Jil R.
(2025)
"Alaála: Tropical Memory,"
Kritika Kultura:
No.
46, Article 17.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.13185/1656-152X.2166
Available at:
https://archium.ateneo.edu/kk/vol1/iss46/17
