The Woman Who Had Two Navels
by Nick Joaquin
A Filipino woman with two navels. A country looking for itself.
For you if
you want to understand Filipino identity through a novel that takes seriously the question of whether colonialism left anything intact
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Manila, 1947. A young Filipino woman claims to have two navels and seeks help from a Spanish doctor in Hong Kong whose own past in the Philippines is entangled with her family's. Joaquin uses this strange premise to dispatch from inside the Filipino colonial psyche — the layers of Spanish and American influence, the question of what Filipino identity is beneath the colonial sediment, whether there is an authentic Filipino self that survived three centuries of foreign rule. The foundational Filipino novel in English and the most formally ambitious. A dispatch about national identity as something that has to be excavated from under other people's stories.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- Philippines • Southeast Asia
- Voice
- Written by a Filipino author
Same event, different angle
The same history — told by someone who saw it differently.
Same pattern, different era
Different time, different place. The same thing keeps happening.
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Flip the lens
Same country. Now hear it from the other side.