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I AM THE PRESIDENT’S WIFE!!
by Miguel Syjuco
It is a rare novel that makes you dizzy at the same time with admiration, exhaustion, bewilderment and desolation in the world it lays before you, at the reach of its author and his skill. Add to that a dose of borderline despair for the future of our species and you have an idea of how you’ll feel at the end of Miguel Syjuco’s flawed but compelling political satire, “I was the President’s Mistress!!”
Syjuco, who won the Man Asian Literary Award for her previous novel, “illustrator”, an expatriate Filipino writer born in 1976 to a prominent Manila family, holds an MFA from Columbia, a Ph.D. He graduated from the University of Adelaide with a professorship at NYU Abu Dhabi, a post with The New Yorker, and a consulting position with the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime. “I must humbly accept my privilege and my limitations,” he says cautiously of his generation. Privilege is evident when the book unveils its vision of interlocking corruption among the extraordinarily corrupt elite that presided over Asia’s oldest democracy. These movers and shakers may have been cartoonish for comic effect, but the sickly-sweet taste of their lives oozes authenticity that suggests long, intimate exposure. “Limitations” are harder to discern. By sheer effort (“I have to continually expand, deepen, and improve my understanding,” continues the disarming author’s note), or simply by a supreme imagination, Syjuco manages to get the other half of society—migrant workers, slum dwellers, the disenfranchised. minorities – almost as vividly to the page as kleptocrats and media moguls. The novelist’s empathy appears to be flawed: it has almost too many claims on the reader’s attention, too strongly suppressed for the book to have had a chance to work in any traditional way.
The text claims to be transcripts of 24 interviews recorded by the author during the two fiery months between the impending impeachment of a noxious populist president, Fernando Estregan (based on the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte, but with prominent Trump notes). his ex-mistress and current rival, the day before the country goes to the polls. Twelve of the interviews are with his former mistress Vita Nova, a tailor’s daughter, sex goddess, media celebrity, and an avid national savior. The rest, alternating with hers, include her exes, starting with the president and parading back in time to her young lover: a gallery of men who have grown, worn out, or left behind who have collectively equipped the indomitable Vita with an advanced training in the arts. transactional eroticism and brutal self-promotion.
Contributions of the person asking the question are mostly marked as “.inaudibleThese interviews are essentially dramatic monologues and, like classics of the genre, rich in deliberate avoidance and incidental explanation. Sound is an important part of the effect. Syjuco writes in Filipino-fueled English and has created a flexible, puzzled slang that adapts itself beautifully to a variety of genres, from the sinister Catholic bishop to the dopey party animal, the fat cat state governor, and the crazy conspiracy theorists.
In Estregan’s case, verbal babble and incoherent bursts of hum create a kind of noise-picture of the stupidity in power: “Let them blame…they’re barking the wrong dog…why should I be scared? Fear can’t do it… I’ll never cringe… I’m not a squeaky loose wrist [homosexual] … my serious duties.” With Bishop, Yoda-like syntactic inversions (“we must be on the lookout”) convey the spiraling movements of a dangerously cunning mind. The provincial governor, a corrupt genius, throws a banquet to the negotiator, offering ludicrously outrageous justifications for his regime of outright bribery and nepotism (“Only two of the Twelve Apostles were not related to our Lord Jesus Christ”) and periodically breaks off Macbeth’s Seyton To summon his steward in an inspiring echo of his call to: “Respeto! Kalamansi-vodka sorbet!”
Vita itself gushes like a YouTube influencer on automated dating, her performative candor gushing around a calculating self-interest bar as she comments on the looming political crisis and fills her interrogator (who seems to be quickly tempted) with carefully curated anecdotes. life and loves. Here, he invites himself to his ninth interview, right after a rally for an Islamic politician to whom he has temporarily attached himself:
“Namaste! It’s crowded, isn’t it? Incredible balls. The campaign is going great. Top of the polls! Me and Nur, only two weeks until the day of victory. Don’t I look fantastic in fuchsia? Thanks for coming all this way. Let me close that door… Here it is. 🎵 just the two of us. It feels like years. Are you working? Your aura is very gangster.”
The downside to these aggressive verbal styles is that a little goes a long way. Men are limited to a single monologue, each of which seems to be true. But the stupidity of Vita, who walks a fine line between fun and annoying (the story requires that she stays cute even when she’s terrified), 12 rounds and at one point, the fire hose of tabloid scandal and porn-toned political intrigue. threatens to turn life upside down.
This is undoubtedly intentional – the widespread corruption of politics is the main theme – but it does cause some tiresome tensions. The problem is not caused by any particular lack of narrative drive. While much of the interview material points to the past, the real-time action of the blame drama takes place completely offstage. Surrounding the latter are certainly intriguing questions: Who will testify? Will the president declare martial law? How will the various fake news and smear campaigns turn out? However, as interviewees mentioned in passing, we hear about these issues only by chance. It’s an interesting formal device, but it mutes the story.
Thus, we were left alone with the monologues of the lovers. If these were just polished exercises in voiceover and imitation, I’m not sure if the book would have been worth the demands it made. But they are much more than that. Combining technical virtuosity with a psychological clout that reveals the delicate emotional dynamic that drives each of these distorted and fragmented figures, and then tracing their evolution back to their political perspective, the best of them seem to me like miniature masterpieces of form. As a result, the often impulsive beliefs these men hold are presented with frustratingly sympathetic insight. Rarely has the bigoted, bigoted, self-serving “patriot” made his case for them so openly in a progressive-minded work of fiction. To read an interview with Estregan’s spokesperson, a former Marxist suffering from “religious fatigue,” is to feel the corrosive power of political magic on your own nerves. To expose yourself to the virtuoso cadences of QAnon-style madness emanating from another lover, One-Mig, is to feel the potent toxicity of advanced conspiracy theory blooming in your own veins.
Lovers aren’t exactly monsters. There’s a half-honored journalist, a couple of half-loving (and hilarious) stone throwers and stagehands; There is Nur, in which this violent protest of a book is clearly written, voicing the central vision of inequality and injustice. But the Vita’s politics seem to be put together, both good and bad. The chilling idea that he is almost certainly the best hope for his country, especially for that faltering republic’s resemblance to ours.
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