The Allegory of the Billiken in Nick Joaquin’s The Woman Who Had Two Navels Capitalism as Religion in the Philippines under US Rule (1902-1946)

Abstract

At the center of Philippine writer Nick Joaquin’s masterpiece, The Woman Who Had Two Navels (published in 1961), is a series of dialogues and debates around an image worshipped by the central character, Connie Escobar. This image, as we discover, is a Billiken, which is a Buddha-like image that was largely responsible for inciting a doll craze in the United States towards the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. In this essay, I bring the history of this image to bear on an interpretation of Nick Joaquin’s novel, which revolves around the author’s diagnosis of the postwar Philippines. My analysis highlights Joaquin’s threefold critique of capitalism, Christianity, and the state in their historical conjuncture; one that, paradoxically, coincides with the identification of the Philippines as an independent and national republic in 1946. By studying this critique, I show how the baroque ethos that drives much of Joaquin’s writing features a poetic and political project that involves the dismantling, disentanglement, and disengagement of each object of critique with the other two.