Filipino Dreaming

The Powers of Death and the Limits of Diagnostic Narratives

Abstract

This article provides a transnational perspective on the Filipino American novel Leche (2011) and its depiction of both tsismis (“gossip”) and the fatal Filipino medical phenomenon bangungot (“nightmare”). I pay particular attention to the unpredictability of bangungot—its ability to paralyze and kill during sleep without warning—which is precisely why it becomes an object of speculation and gossip. Through Leche, I examine how bangungot kills, but also how it lives on through tsismis, and how tsismis provides not a medical diagnosis, but an unofficial and insurgent narrative through which to understand bangungot, and queer Filipino fantasies and desires, differently. By going against postmodernist and poststructuralist discourses on narrative, I highlight how bangungot’s haunting quality and refusal to be medically diagnoseable disrupt Western diagnostic traditions, which are novelistic. My use of tsismis also highlights subaltern forms of documentation that run counter to imperial narratives of development, enlightenment, and modernity. Throughout the article, I incorporate personal narrative, speculations, alternative sources, and fantasies to challenge imperial notions of theorizing and knowledge-making. Bangungot quietly and violently kills, but it also continues to live on, not in scientific certainty or in the developmental depths of the novel, but in the fleeting and evasive speculations, experiences, and fantasies of Filipinos.