The Descartes Highlands is an area of the moon where the Apollo 16 expedition landed in 1972 and scooped up rocks and soil, leaving dark tracks that can be glimpsed through a telescope to this day. Manila-born, New York-based author Eric Gamalinda chose that region as the title of his fifth novel partly because 1972 was also the year in which the Philippines began its descent into political chaos after Ferdinand Marcos imposed martial law. begins with a young American who gets embroiled in Philippine politics and is jailed. Desperate, he sells his two sons, both born in the Philippines. The brothers are adopted by different families from New York and France, and the novel weaves together their stories and their father's. Shortlisted for the 2009 Man Asian Literary Prize, is Gamalinda's first work to be published in the US. He has also written three books of poetry and two short-story collections. Gamalinda spoke with about his latest novel and his formative years under Marcos' repressive rule.
After my last novel, , won the Philippines' Centennial Literary Prize in 1998 [the novel was later published in 2000], I wanted to do something different … but every time I came up with an idea, somebody else was already writing it. Then [the] 9/11 [terrorist attacks] happened and I went through a difficult period of reassessment about everything I was doing, even in my writing. There was so much paranoia and xenophobia that I felt a sense of alienation, even in New York, where people are supposed to be more connected. So I wanted to convey my sense of alienation, but I didn't want to write a 9/11 story - I knew everybody was writing one. I wanted to begin the novel in 1972 because I felt that what was going on in the US post-9/11 was much the same as what I experienced in the 1970s during martial law in the Philippines. There was this atmosphere of fear in both countries - for a couple of years you couldn't say anything negative about George W. Bush without being interpreted as anti-American.
I was in high school in 1972 - young and naïve - and didn't care much about politics. My first experience was censorship. I was the editor of our school paper in Manila and also the director of our English club. I was about to stage a production of the Arthur Miller play . My school directors told me as soon as martial law was declared that they were cancelling the production because it was too close to home. They also stopped the school paper because all publications were banned in the first year of martial law. And then my mother, who was working for , lost her job when Marcos took over the newspaper and jailed most of its editors and reporters. Eventually, against the advice of my parents, I became a journalist, which was one way for me to find out what was going on under Marcos. His regime was very violent. There were a lot of killings, a lot of torture. And of course, Marcos and his cronies stole a lot of money. There was a lot of [economic] inequality. The whole psyche of the Philippines changed.
