‘Tuyaw’, a Reminder of the Dead or Another Way to Talk about the Weather in the Age of the Super-Typhoon

Abstract

In the wake of mass calamity, one can discern emergent specters of collective memory, trauma, and mourning over human death as well as the destruction of human dwellings. In the Philippines, a former Spanish and U.S. colony, recent history is resplendent with all manner of cataclysms - from natural disasters (earthquakes, typhoons) to mass destruction during war (Spanish-American War and World War II). This essay is concerned with the ways in which dreams and the dead are not just after-effects of events in linear-time nor exclusively human affects. Drawing on scholars of experimental ethnography and postcolonial film theory converging on Gilles Deleuze's “time-image”, dreams authored by the dead here are engaged as agentive fabulators on decay, destruction, and loss – first on the local level of experiencing disaster but further connecting that more broadly to loss of heritage sites and the possible future prospect of serial calamity augured by neoliberal development and climate change in the Pacific.