Randy Ribay’s Patron Saints of Nothing is incredibly Pinoy. From the descriptions of the streets to the characterizations of the people and the pride a few characters regard the country to how others consider it with well-warranted criticism, it was so achingly familiar that fellow Filipinos could feel right at home. It was almost as if you could walk around the city alongside Jay, seeing the sites, new yet achingly familiar.
As Filipino readers can be delighted as they rediscover “home,” a few can empathize with Jay’s feelings of illegitimacy, fraudulence, and intrusion. People who are labeled “too western” and the sting of rejection for being Other in a sea of faces similar to theirs. So similar yet so different. In fact, what he said about speaking Tagalog could’ve been picked right out of my mouth with added eloquence: “My mouth feels too heavy, too thick, too slow to produce the light, rapid syllables Filipinos spit with such ease. I curse my parents for not teaching me the language when I was young, when the struggle would have seemed more like a fun game than an identity crisis.”
I particularly love how his monolingualism was utilized in the story. For non-Tagalog speaking readers, I imagine they would empathize with Jay’s frustration for not being able to understand the native tongue: they’d kill to know what jokes were cackled in Jay’s expense, what exactly Tito Maning wrote in the police report, and what Tita Ami’s last message to her son was. In these little parts of the book, we want him to understand, and we want to see these little details that are privy to us, the audience. It is amazing how effective this is in imitating Jay’s frustration with himself having the urge to understand the syllables rapidly spat out around him. I'd know! I experienced it before.
Throughout the book, there are plenty of interjections that ring so true when it comes to building the Filipino identity. Although heavy-handed and incredibly on-the-nose, these details summarize the sentiments of people I actually know. One of which is this: “It strikes me that I cannot claim this country’s serene coves and sun-soaked beaches without also claiming its poverty, its problems, its history. To say that any aspect of it is part of me is to say that all of it is part of me.”
Speaking of problems, Patron Saints conveyed certain cultural issues so subtly, my eyes snagged on them only on instinct. There were shades of classic crab mentality, blatant hypocrisy, and casual toxic competitiveness throughout Jay’s stay in the Philippines built under the more glaring issues of sexism, violence, and poverty. Tita Ami saying that there are so many poor people in the country that trying to help will only make you end up like them and Tito Maning criticizing everyone on the table per routine are the main examples I can think of. If we look real close at Jay's house tour, we can see an allegory to the sentiment of individuals striving to improve their space while disregarding other problem areas around the country, leaving the poor and oppressed behind in the dust.
I found this book so lyrical and moving while finding it wrapped in such a predictable, unsurprising story fitting for a young adult novel. Throughout Patron Saints, Randy Ribay writes a narrative that’s like a love letter, a photograph, and a manifesto pamphlet for the Philippines, and it’s so obvious that it spills over the story to the point of being overwhelming.
For a story about truth, it conveys a truth; it’s digestible, poignant, and understandable. To those who get the in-jokes, they laugh feeling both joy and pain. It conveys the feeling of being too eastern for the west and too western for the east; when you feel biased to one side, or worse, lacking in both. It conveys human and Filipino experiences frankly and glibly. It was a weird sort of homecoming and reminder for me. A homecoming in the sense of making it home and taking a good look at the house you’ve made for yourself while remembering to look out the window to face reality, and a reminder to tell you that it’s never too late to relearn the history and heritage of who you claim to be.
Want to see more essays like this? Check out Io’s blog at thereadingmoon.tumblr.com for more hot takes or book recommendations.
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