Erika M. Carreon questions the imposed linear temporality that subjects the Philippine tropics to a state forever backward and out-of-step.

Part of What Time Tells, an ongoing series on time and the problems we face today. Published in conjunction with Countering Time, AAA’s exhibition about archival time and the idea of afterlives.

Out of Joint: Panahon and the Tropics

Once, I visited my home briefly. I had just bleached my hair and burned my scalp; the whole time I was home I was pulling bits of dead skin out of my hair. After so long away I noticed my mother’s hands were bleaching themselves. A disease, she said. Triggered by stress. What stress, I asked, and she just gave a wry smile, gesturing around us, at everything else. I come home to a strange house. Utensils I’ve known all my life, worn down. The little familiarities that aged without me. Outside, everything was starting to fray. Stray cats we were feeding had clumps of fur falling off.

After hunting for a piece of beach not inundated by trash floating in the water, we found a nautilus shell among the bleached bits of coral littering the shore. Naturally—why naturally?—I took it home. I tried soaping it, but I couldn’t scrub the sea from it, and I wondered with horror if I had killed any living creature that had used it as a home. So many thoughtless everyday cruelties. 

I am writing in Naarm, in so-called Australia, in spring. I cannot be happier to see the sun, feel the temperature announce the change in seasons. Winter had ended on a warmer note, and I am not alone in rejoicing. Rejoicing here also means ignoring the wrongness of this aberrant weather, this bleeding of seasons. Not the right time. Not the right weather. In my mother tongue: “Hindi tama ang panahon,” where both time and weather coalesce in the word “panahon.” Already people speculate: will this unusual warmth bring some other unexpected turn, perhaps a too-hot summer, a longer winter next year? I tell people I have the tropics in my blood, that I’m not made for the cold, that even the slightest dip below twenty degrees Celsius has me reaching for my thickest jacket. 

But in invoking the tropics, I think not of old, familiar heat, but of rain: torrential, loud, precursor to Flood, handmaiden to Typhoon, and I feel discomfort prickling me, holding me hostage with guilt at needlepoint. I can afford to complain about the cold in this clement weather, far, far away from the tropical monsoon whose periodic arrival I’ve feared since childhood. The winds that gust through Naarm, for all their strength, had never made me flinch the way it did back home, never made me fear a roof getting torn off. I had lost the instinct to be afraid of the weather, as if I had been scrubbed clean of it with each cycle of these temperate seasons. 

What does it mean to think of panahon, then, when I write away from it? I ask this question as I revise my project called Tropical Futurism, at once a collection of speculative short stories set in the strange future of an archipelago that may or may not be the Philippines and a critical-creative response to this very act, or challenge, of imagining the future for zones that are most vulnerable to climate disasters. 

I ask this question because that needling, prickling doubt has sewn into my skin a thread of pain stretched taut between myself in the present and the tropical country that raised me. With each word, a finger plucks at this string, pulling it towards visions of apocalypse. Cities sinking into anoxic water. Fishkill covering the coastlines in a blanket of silver and red. Illness spreading faster than hearsay. A whole country displaced by storm, the cries of ghosts of the unheeded dead of previous calamities swallowed by gale. Lashed by the memory of Typhoon Ondoy and Yolanda and chained to the floor by the pandemic, my imagination cannot help its tunnel vision. The apocalyptic future tugs harder. 

It is this pull I am trying to resist in Tropical Futurism, a project first conceived as a response to Nick Admussen’s critique of literature’s complicity in the climate crisis, particularly towards his first proposal: “Reject progress narratives,” wherein “progress” means a decadent modernist amnesia rendering the past obsolete, driven by “the logic of increase and intensity.”¹ By perpetuating this same progressive logic in our stories, we echo, amplify, manifest the continuing existence of this story in the larger world outside the page. I take from this proposal a rejection of another idea wedded to narrative: that time runs in a straight line, the conclusion of which has been determined by our consumption of this planet. 

Tropical Futurism is a short story collection inspired by various non-realist genres, drawn in particular to the way the borders of these genres touch whenever they defamiliarise the world: the cosmic horror and the grotesque highlighting the smallness of the human in the New Weird; the supernatural and folkloric creeping into our world through fabulism; and the interrogation of what is possible within this reality in science fiction. While I do not always name the Philippines directly in my work, the archipelago haunts each story I wrote for it, the islands warped and transformed by strange forces and destructive climate, the elemental violence inflicted upon it both an echo and a result of other historic and everyday violences that plague us in the here and now. But in order to write towards Admussen’s provocations, I need to interrogate what it is I am requiring of my own imagination. 

To imagine my way out of doom therefore necessitates another kind of temporality beyond the linearity of progress narratives. Tropical temporality, by way of the word panahon as pieced together by Christian Jil Benitez, by its very existence seems to answer my yearning for a different futurity to weave itself into my stories. In pondering the roots of “Filipino Time,” a term often used derogatorily to refer to us as always late, always behind, a judgment arising from modernist standardisation introduced during the American colonial period, Benitez reestablishes how panahon escapes translation into Western colonial temporality.² Instead of a concept hewing to an abstracted notion of time, panahon is deeply embedded in material relations.³

Looking at its definitions from UP Diksyonaryong Filipino to the Vocabulario de la Lengua Tagala, Benitez foregrounds the irreducibility of panahon into abstract terms such as “time”⁴ or “season,” which invite comparisons to the temperate region and the outside world, while gesturing away from the lived experience of the person in the tropics defining the word.⁵ With each attempt to lexicographically clarify panahon, the word accrues more material through which it achieves meaning, from weather conditions to ideas of plenitude associated with harvest time. Benitez arrives, then, at this idea: panahon is what arises out of patience and opportunity; when talking of seasons, for one, panahon transforms, it isn’t simply the season of plenty, but is “the fruit itself, harvested and held, looked at, smelled, tasted—or whatever one desires to do as to encounter the said fruit.”⁶ Panahon is understood through entanglements, is present in indigenous knowledge, and surfaces through, even as it evades attempts at mastering its meaning or divorcing it from its web of relations. Panahon then functions as a metonym, for panahon can be anything, its “what-ness” only clarified through the assembly of living and nonliving things that interact with each other.⁷

To acknowledge my feeling of disjointment in writing future stories is an acknowledgment of a yearning for a different panahon, now that I have moved from my place of origin, where I have up to this point been thinking, feeling, creating, into a new place with its own seasons, its own sense of time, its own settler-colonial history of violence. This yearning is a making-space through Story for the existence of conflicting and competing times—one imposed by modernity as a kind of othering, the other morphing, changing, depending on the specific entanglements between story and materiality. At its center sits a Conflicted Storyteller, forced to navigate these temporalities and their own desires for belonging or survival. It is this storyteller that I see in the speculative fiction of Tropical Futurism. It is this storyteller that I see in myself. 

^{Image: Illustration courtesy of the author.}

Tropical Time and the Conflicted Storyteller

The nautilus sits, dead and empty, on the shelf, as a repurposed lamp. Its ancestor sits encased in sandstone, discovered in a place called Talim Point, the oldest fossil of the species in the world. The nautilus sits on a knife’s edge as more and more of them adorn more and more shelves. The nautilus is also the name of several resorts around the Philippines, and the name of a project that proposes to protect the ecosystems of the archipelago’s waterways. This project is, of course, a resort. The illustrations show buildings shaped like shells, perched on artificial islands arranged in spirals on some nondescript island coast. Self-sustaining, mindful of wildlife, collaborating with locals, this nautilus is supposed to bridge the human and the nonhuman. It is a beautiful bridge, if the illustrations are any indication. Our guilt on one end, our way of life on the other. Many love our beaches, many come to the tropics for temporary relief. 

I see the shell, empty of life and of its proper context, put my ear to its entrance, and hear, rumbling from its chambers, the sound of floodwaters rising. I drop it, and it shatters into a thousand pieces of bleached coral. Behind me, the stench of rot. Beneath my feet, a pavement of limestone. Ahead of me, a shadow of a creature, its contours amorphous, refuses to resolve into anything familiar when I train my eyes on it. Instead, it flits just within my field of vision, darts to the edge of it, baiting me. I turn away from what had broken apart before my feet, towards other imagined horrors.

The idea behind Tropical Futurism sprouted from my interest in the fantastic, the supernatural, the worlds lurking beyond the fragile illusion of stability in a sheltered urban middle-class life, of this world, the here and now, made strange. But this interest had been molded further by the Philippine tropics—its storms, now turned supertyphoons, the helplessness that came with them, the strange devastation they leave behind. Tropical Futurism is peppered, contaminated, with my memories of flood and all the ways my body and memory carry it. It has become strange to write about, here where the seasons are different and I don’t, for the moment, have to worry about when to start moving furniture, appliances, and personal effects out of reach of encroaching, murky water. My family lives far away from our original home, and I crossed to another continent, where, to borrow Jaya Jacobo’s conceptualisation of “homo tropicus,” the tempo of seasons is different from the tempo of “double time” of the dry and wet seasons.⁸

For Jacobo, “homo tropicus” emerges out of the tropology of Philippine literature as a figure that serves as “an epiphany in time,” a reclamation of the time lost because of the colonial, temperate gaze relegating the tropical Other to the past, sequestered from the present until “discovered” through ethnography or narrative. It is a withering gaze, born from the self-bestowed privilege of the Western ethnographer to put himself squarely in the more progressive and enlightened present, alternatively called the “denial of coevalness” by Johannes Fabian and “anachronistic space” Anne McClintock.⁹ In this contentious, temporal push-and-pull, Jacobo sees in various texts Homo Tropicus navigating that divide, governed by the desire to arrive or emerge out of one time and into another.¹⁰

To be tropical, by way of Jacobo, is to be keenly aware of being temporally unmoored. I am drawn in particular, however, to her reading of a particular passage from the novel Noli Me Tangere, one of two celebrated novels by national hero Jose Rizal, published in 1887. Its protagonist, Crisostomo Ibarra, had spent a large part of his life as a gentleman abroad, but upon coming home and seeing the Botanical gardens, is momentarily overcome by the “demon of comparisons” when he is reminded of the gardens in Europe. This spectre, Jacobo observes, “forces one, while caught in a dissimulating trance, to recognize an ominous difference, struggle with its refusal to cohere with familiarity and homeliness.”¹¹ That sense of observing his country of origin as not belonging to contemporaneity, that strife, overwhelms him for that instant, and he averts his eyes, turns away, denies what is in front of him. 

One imagines Rizal himself grappling with similar struggles. As a member of the Ilustrados, the anticolonial Filipino educated class who had lived in Europe during the late nineteenth century, he, along with his compatriots, have tried to come to terms with the tropics after having experienced living abroad. The “alienating” terrain of Spain; their relative positions of privilege in the Philippines giving them a different experience of calamity; and, in the case of Rizal, a homecoming that impressed upon him that he can no longer experience the climate of his home without comparing it to the temperate climate of Europe, show how they have been caught up in the competing temporalities of an imposed sense of “progress” and their shifting senses of panahon before and after travelling away from the Philippines.¹²

Through a different time and different calamities and precarities that nevertheless are caused by the same logics of Empire that Rizal and his cadres have had to confront—here I sit in these entangled temporalities, seeing Homo Tropicus in the Conflicted Storyteller of my own attempts to make sense of panahon. The flood still reaches me, looms large in my imagination as the emblem of tropical precarity, even as I ask myself how I could ever write, construct, inhabit a panahon where the tropics survives through new entanglements when all I feel is cut off and conflicted. I start with Story, because this precarity resides within the body, a precarity that seeks to gesture outward from an interiority and take shape as narrative.

To think in terms of this precarity is to situate oneself first as a body capable of drowning. Does it ever flood here? is a question I had often asked as a transplanted tropical subject, even though I had known the answer to this before my entry into this temperate zone. The flood follows, however, as memory, as apocalyptic spectre of the here-and-now, as influx of bodies from one continent to the other. Flood is contradiction, both excess and erasure, consumption and regurgitation, seemingly singular-minded in its sweeping destruction, but capable of metamorphosis, from flowing current to stagnant muck. The Flood carries the memory of a visceral experience, just as it has carried with it a mythical significance, and the Conflicted Storyteller is carried along with it, from the page and out of it, to bear witness and stare out. Stare back.

I cannot look away. 

^{Image: Illustration courtesy of the author.}

Panahon Ng Alamat: Time Made Fantastic

I am hypnotised by this rabid animal as it runs around, chasing shadows, or flashes of light, leaving a technicolour blur with each revolution. Outside, the earth has gone awry. Wildebeests fall lovingly into waiting jaws. Flocks splatter against windshields. Praying mantises eat through their entire population of husbands. The animal has been here since yesterday, crashing through the window and, somehow, surviving, only to continue its suicide sprint in the small space of my room. I’d like to think it wants to keep me company, even as my neighbours open their arms to chunks of moon. Every hour I tell myself this is it, this is when it ends, yet with each cigarette it exceeds expectations. I am not in a hurry. I can watch it run its body to the ground. 

The Conflicted Storyteller in Tropical Futurism manifests as a character, and a point of view, torn between two things: 1) conformity to modern linear time, in which the tropical subject is forever crystallised as backward, an anachronism, and forced by the tyranny of what Bliss Cua Lim calls, via Walter Benjamin, “modern homogeneous time” out of relationality with the rest of the tropics, and 2) a recognition of other temporal rhythms lying outside of clock time that are tied to the material realities of the tropics; complicated by colonial history, class conflicts; and disrupted by unprecedented climate events. As navigators of competing panahon, this storyteller vacillates between the two as the borders between urban, rural, human, and nonhuman are rendered increasingly porous, the stability of linear time upended. 

When I think of disruptions I can make of the future by passing through this delirious present, my imagination runs towards the fantastic by default.

Years ago, a male colleague remarked with amusement that he associated my writing with “domesticity.” Barring the much longer conversation on gender expectations that this offhand remark might have provoked, I had chewed on this statement for years, wondering what it said about myself as a writer. It seemed to confirm my dread—that, I was too sheltered, my concerns too insular, and therefore my writing too cut off from the world. Yet I keep coming back to this idea, finding something about it ringing true, even as I continued to enjoy writing between genres, switching between forms. From irrealism to domestic fabulism to “fragments” that I can’t quite bring myself to label “prose poetry,” I rehearse the feeling of the everyday as inherently unsettling, that the skin of our houses crawl at the sight of us, what we continue to do to ourselves and the world around us, wood and brick and cement ever so subtly developing goosepimples, the foundations shaking, wishing to recoil.

And still something escapes, thrives, even as—or, precisely because—the fabulous and the fantastic upend and unsettle, thereby allowing for the possibility of unmaking our temporal prisons. For instance, in the enduring figure of the aswang—viscera eaters from Philippine folklore—Lim sees subversive potential, as critique of the urban-rural divide, as allegory for corruption in Philippine politics, as media sensation that exposes the fictions and anxieties of the urban middle class, and as revenge against patriarchal othering, all because, like the supernatural, like the very tropics itself that produced it, these folkloric figures exist “with one foot in historical time and the other outside it.”¹³ Meanwhile, Alan Punzalan Isaac likewise searches for disruptions and possibilities outside of linear national time through the affective worlds that migrant Filipino workers construct as part of the web of relations experienced in diaspora. The speculative manifests as a tactical gambling with the future, as migratory subjects “live and weave narratives of place and belonging, produce new modes of connections and ways to feel time with others,”¹⁴ a resistance to modern time’s subjugation of the migrant’s very body to the clock of commodified labour. It is possible to regard this as almost supernatural, as the migrant negotiates with possible futures, and where these possibilities exist in relation and connection, not in transaction.

As a result of my initial encounter with Nick Admussen, I wrote what would become the first short story in Tropical Futurism: in “Flotsam,” the animal and the nonhuman are central to the story alongside the human survivors. Within the world of “Flotsam” exists aether, a valuable substance that becomes precious fuel and at the same time seems to be at the heart of strange transformations affecting the inhabitants of this future. Aside from the savants, the group of humans who take it upon themselves to study and develop the aether, and the Mamanlaut, who try to survive without the benefit of the technology the savants enjoy, this future is also populated by seemingly sentient dwellings that form the havens called “Balay Hunyango,” within which dwell the savants, as well as mysterious creatures who disrupt the tenuous cycle of labour and survival the Mamanlaut have to endure to harvest aether. 

Narrated in fourth person, both individuals and collectives move and are moved by forces beyond the scope of human influence. The titular creatures whose origins are never explicated are both shelter for, and master over, what remains of humanity, inspired by siphonophores, sightings of whale carcasses, and the myths and symbols we weave around our oceans. Perhaps this is just the natural trajectory arising from that unease with life-as-it-is, that to ponder domesticity, and my attendant ambivalence towards the labelling of my work as such, is to ponder what our stories are for, what a person from a tropical archipelagic nation sees when she is asked to peer into the future—hers, and her country’s. 

She imagines godstorms and noxious waters. She imagines the stubborn survival of the modernist, exclusionary City and the progressive logic of technocrats. She imagines resilience—how bitter it tastes on the tongue. However—

Something bites into me. I look down at my arm and see a fishhook pierced through my skin. A silver line stretched taut, pointing down, disappearing into dark water that now rises slowly up to my shin. 

Something tugs. 

I wrap my other hand around the line and I pull. I feel something come away, like an anchor rising. The weight of it—I thought my skin would tear.

The Conflicted Storyteller Abroad

Throughout the journey of putting together Tropical Futurism, I had unconsciously invoked a mantra to summon the unpredictability and ward off the devastation of the Flood: I am imagining a future where my reader survives. Writing the project with this mantra in mind has proven difficult these past four years, and I must recognise the conditions within which this project was made: towards the latter years of a Duterte presidency—itself a product of yet-to-be addressed systemic injustices—which had helped set the stage for the return of Marcoses into national power in the Philippines; the pandemic years, which had worsened the aforementioned injustices both in my homeland and those within the unceded lands upon which I am currently residing; various global conflicts that have consequences both to the Filipinos spread out throughout the world and those staying behind, all dealing with the impact of these conflicts upon our labour force and our resources; and, finally, the continued worsening of climate change.

Reflecting upon this difficulty, I’ve realised that at the heart of Tropical Futurism is a self-examination of how I constantly negotiate my positionality as writer straddling these different panahon, writing in a seemingly escapist genre of fiction that nevertheless affords me the space through which to make room for a possible future for the tropics. It is a recognition of myself as Conflicted Storyteller, keenly aware that I can just as easily slip into the tendency to be absorbed within the oppressive linearity that confines me as tropical subject in anachronistic space, and in so doing also produce narratives that impose a limiting worldview upon my place of origin.

Rina Garcia Chua echoes a similar sentiment in arguing for the rethinking of Filipino/x migrant identities. Rather than affixing this identity to one place, Chua speaks of a dexterous “migratory consciousness,” focusing “on the multiplicities of identities…that deterritorialise concepts of “place” and “home” in ecocrticism.¹⁵ By finding ourselves occupying many spaces at once, this migratory consciousness opens up the relationship of environment and environmental texts to “the interlocking systems of oppressions that is part of what makes our world unlivable.”¹⁶ 

Tropical Futurism entangles me within these ever-shifting threads of flow and movement. Returning to Rizal, Glenn Diaz points to an incident, a land dispute with the Dominicans that resulted in his family’s disenfranchisement as a major turning point in Rizal’s poetics, a testament to what he calls the “illegibility” or “liminality” of tropical forests “as material and imaginative sites of complex historical reckoning,” as they “trouble long-held anthropocentric ideas about fiction, history, and nation in the context of Philippine literary production.”¹⁷ The tropical forest exercises a “vital agency” of “absorption, incubation, and enactment of anti-capitalist thought.”¹⁸

^{Image: Jose S. Carreon, Jr., during Typhoon Ondoy (international name Ketsana), 2009. Courtesy of the author.}

The flood carries similar connotations in me. Though the yearly floods had instilled fear and anxiety in me, I would always, still, return to my memory of the strangeness the flood leaves behind: the creatures in our garden that hadn’t been there before, an opportunity for something to survive, displaced though it might be. I see the Flood as another manifestation of panahon upending those well-worn progress narratives. While the Forest foments resistance outside of the neocolonial city, the Flood rises up from underneath, destroys, or invades from outside, but also holds still modern time in the city and the nation, reminding us of the many turns of the tropics.

From Rizal and the Ilustrados, to the current wave of migrants dispersed around the world, thinking and rethinking their bonds to every new environment, the Philippine tropics continue to tie us all together through space and time in the narratives we weave about it. We transplant the tropics through our necessary embrace of, and resistance to, adaptation in spaces that welcome, tolerate, and reject us in turns, and we feel this through our language, through our bodies.

From the water emerged the clutter of a whole city all tangled up with the fishing line. Trash, sewage waste, stray animals, its informal settlers, its “Disappeared.” The wet rot smell of flooded basements and shanties. Tarpaulins with familiar dynastic names running for the next election. There are other figures I cannot see. Rain thundering on tin roofs.

I look up, and I am inside a large oil-slicked chamber. No, not oil, but nacre. That rot-smell lingers, turns, melds with other wet smells. Brine, sea-weed, fish-stench.

I feel my limbs lengthen. My body grows mollusc-soft, fills the chamber until its contours are my contours. The edges of my vision blur, the world rendered through a pinhole. The waters rise around me, and I let the empty chambers flood, the weight of them taking me below. 

Somewhere, my mother calls me home through the petrichor in the air. Somewhere, careful hands dig me out of rock and solidified detritus of ages. Somewhere, I am found washed up on some shore, and I am returned to the tide. 

I sleep for millenia, and wait.

Erika M. Carreon is the Philippines Literary editor at Cordite Poetry Review. Her literary works have appeared in Kritika Kultura, Anomaly Journal, Kalliope X, and in Ulirát: Best Contemporary Stories in Translation from the Philippines. She co-founded and co-edited Plural Online Journal and currently collaborates with Neobie Gonzalez as Occult’s Razor to produce hybrid art and literary artifacts. She earned her MFA at De La Salle University, Manila, and her PhD in creative writing at the University of Melbourne with a special interest in ecofiction. Her artwork and illustrations have appeared in Three Books written by Mesandel Virtusio Arguelles and translated by Kristine Ong Muslim, Rurok: Comics & Art Anthology, and in SOL Gallery’s SOULS group exhibition. 

Notes

^{1. Nick Admussen, “Six Proposals for the Reform of Literature in the Age of Climate Change,” The Critical Flame, 10 May 2016.}

^{2. Christian Jil Benitez, “Panahon and Bagay: Metonymy and the Close Reading of Dictionaries to Understand Filipino Temporality,” Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints, 67, no. 3–4 (2019): 458.}

^{3. Ibid., 459.}

^{4. Ibid., 460.}

^{5. Ibid., 462.}

^{6. Ibid., 477.}

^{7. Ibid., 466.}

^{8. Jaya Pilapil Jacobo. “Homo Tropicus: A Yearning.” Kritika Kultura, no. 16,(2011): 66.}

^{9. Ibid., 67.}

^{10. Ibid., 68.}

^{11. Ibid., 75.}

^{12. Filomeno V. Aguilar, “Romancing Tropicality: Ilustrado Portraits of the Climate in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints, 64, no. 3–4 (2016): 424–40.}

^{13. Bliss Cua Lim, Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique (Ateneo De Manila University Press, 2011), 142.}

^{14. Allan Punzalan Isaac, Filipino Time: Affective Worlds and Contracted Labor (Fordham University Press, 2022), 21.}

^{15. Rina Garcia Chua, “A Steering to Homes, or toward a Migratory Consciousness in Ecocriticism,” Journal of Southeast Asian Ecocriticism, 1, no. 2 (2023): 113.}

^{16. Ibid., 118.}

^{17. Glenn Diaz, “Into the Woods: Toward a Material Poetics of the Tropical Forest in Philippine Literature,” eTropic: Electronic Journal of Studies in the Tropics, 21, no. 2 (2022): 122.}

^{18. Ibid., 135.}