10.13125/2039-6597/3235
Metro Manila, in the comics series Trese, is a mega city inscribed by hybridity and cultural simultaneity. The stories that assemble there are built from a specific cultural base: local lore, urban legend, and the mundane features of Philippine city life. This paper investigates, through Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, three ‘living spaces’—the cemetery, the dormitory, and the exclusive subdivision—that take the place of the traditional home, highlighting how communal and multivalent such spaces are, and how narratological strategies in comics allow that heterotopic quality to surface.
application/pdf
2039-6597
3235
15
en
Ana Micaela Chua Manansala
Between
Living Spaces
Communal Homes and Heterotopic Contagion in Trese
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between
8
Essay
2018-07-16
2018-02-16
2018-07-10
2018-07-16
1
Ana Micaela Chua Manansala
2018/07/16
10.13125/2039-6597/3235
University of the Philippines
2039-6597
15
Living Spaces
en
Communal Homes and Heterotopic Contagion in Trese
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between/article/download/3235/2957
8
   Communal Homes and Heterotopic
        Contagion in Trese

                    Ana Micaela Chua Manansala

                                      The space in which we live, which draws
                                      us out of ourselves, in which the erosion
                                      of our lives, our time and our history
                                      occurs, the space that claws and gnaws at
                                      us, is also, in itself, a heterogeneous space.
                                                     Foucault, “Of Other Spaces”


                                An Overview
      Trese is a Filipino comic book series created by Budjette Tan and
Kajo Baldisimo. The series has seen six compilations between 2008 and
2017 and has garnered the National Book Award for Best Graphic
Literature in 2009, 2010, and 2012. Generically identified as
supernatural detective fiction, the stories are a mix of ‘case files’ or
episodic investigations and extended narrative arcs that take on a
mythopoetic scale. Most, though not all, stories are set in Metro
Manila, the Philippine capital and the titular detective’s ‘jurisdiction.’
      In previous studies, I have gone into detail regarding Alexandra
Trese’s relation to ‘her city.’ Both as mythic hero and resident
Manileña, Trese can be said to embody the cultural hybridity also
ingrained in her city. In this paper, I demonstrate how Trese enables
specific cultural engagement not only through the deployment of local
lore, a mix of lower mythology and urban legend, but also by building
narratives upward from this definite geographic base. I focus on the
way that living spaces are constructed within that city and how each



Between, vol. VIII, n. 15 (Maggio/ May 2018)
Ana Micaela Chua Manansala, Communal Homes and Heterotopic Contagion in Trese



space reflects particular valuations of human and inhuman life. By
employing Foucault’s concept of heterotopia (1986), attended also by
Foucauldian discourse of power as discussed by Gerard Lico in Edifice
Complex (2003), I analyze three spaces that replace the traditional home,
highlighting the notion of communal and multivalent spaces in
Philippine culture.
      Trese’s world is premised on the simultaneous presence and
cultural evolution of the supernatural alongside the human: the
relation between the underworld and the surfaces of Manila are not
divided by time--Manila by day or by night, or ancient versus modern
times—but by present day cultural politics, which is spatial in its
obsessions with territoriality and social hierarchies, emphasizing the
association between the ‘underworld’ and the criminal. This linkage,
however, cannot be taken for granted: the supernatural underworld is
not always the source of crime. Alexandra Trese’s duties are to
investigate crimes that cross this flimsily constructed boundary
between sacred and mundane without prejudice as to which side
harbors the victim and which the perpetrator. In fact, the first crime in
Trese involves a human murdering a local ghost, while the most recent
installment involves a power syndicate, run by both humans and
supernatural beings, victimizing both terrestrial and aquatic citizens of
Manila. Even the distinction between criminal and victim are often
ambiguous, and the delivery of justice is often more poetic than legal.
      This is where the concept of simultaneity and, later, heterotopia
come in. Foucault claims that we have moved from the nineteenth
century obsession with history into an epoch of simultaneity, that is
«the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-
by-side, of the dispersed» (1986: 1). Yet he also reminds us that space
has its own history, and in Western history the concept of space has
been complicated, at the least, by the displacement of concepts of
medieval space—that is, of emplacement—by the concept of extension,
and finally by the concept of site and siting.
      In applying how «space takes for us the form of relations among
sites» (ibid.: 2) to the reading of Trese, we must also keep in mind what
sort of relations, what sort of cultural history, underlies the preference


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of the discourse of space over time. Such a relation, given the
postcolonial context, can be explored theoretically with reference to
Kumkum Sangari’s concept of cultural simultaneity, which describes
the heterogeneity of narrative voices and cultural practices as an effect
of the “historical sedimentation” of diverse ideological and
epistemological systems—myths, religions, superstitions, stories—
carried by ethnic groups, just as diverse, within that culture (1990: 217).
Philippine culture, though predominantly Catholic, is culturally
heterogeneous in practice and thus open to ‘making sense’ of itself and
its world from more than one point of view at any given time.
     This is why the presence of the supernatural in Trese is best
described as an open secret: humans find ways to communicate with
the supernatural, to run to them for help, or hunt them for personal
gain, and vice versa. Even the most fantastic of crimes in Trese are
made credible from within a Philippine viewpoint by virtue of their
being grounded in present circumstance and the diverse ‘logics’ of
lived experience.
     Finally, the role of the narrative imagination can also be
emphasized through Doreen Massey’s distinction between space as «a
simultaneity of stories-so-far» and place as «a collection of those
stories» (2005: 130). Within this frame, spaces, and the stories such
spaces produce, appear to co-exist unrelated, but their relation or
collection distinguishes them as place or site.
     In its collected form, each episode of Trese opens with a ‘ghost
map’, a road map of a section of Metro Manila presented in the style of
a photographic negative, which denotes the location of the crime. This
could be a street, a district, or a city: the larger the crime, the more
characters involved, the more general the location indicated. It is thus
that Trese redraws Metro Manila as narrative spaces within which
human and inhuman elements are marked and defined—there is no
space that is entirely human or entirely supernatural—and where their
stories are thus collected. Trese begins to map out, in six volumes at
present, the expanse of a greater Metropolitan Manila that goes beyond
observable boundaries and measurements, a city described by
cohabitation and conflict. To problematize in Trese the idea of ‘living


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Ana Micaela Chua Manansala, Communal Homes and Heterotopic Contagion in Trese



spaces’ is certainly more than a matter of checking «whether there will
be enough space for men in the world—a problem that is certainly
quite important—but also that of knowing what relations of
propinquity, what type of storage, circulation, marking, and
classification of human elements should be adopted in a given
situation in order to achieve a given end» (Foucault 1986: 2).
      This is the sort of arrangement that requires critical attention in
the analysis of the cemetery in “Outpost on Kalayaan Street” (Tan –
Baldisimo 2008: 23-44), the cross-sections of the student dormitory in
“Wanted Bedspacer” (Id. 2011: 49-72), and “The Association Dues of
Livewell Village” (Id. 2008: 67-88) with its electrified perimeters. This
selection in no way exhausts the discussion of the use of space in the
series, but they do lay out a spectrum of interpretation that other
‘settings’—other ‘other’ spaces: some of which are liminal, such as
brothels, bars, mall parking lots, and metro rail stations and some
expansive such as the seas plied by human traffickers, militarized
jungles, and of course, the prison system—could be located. I have
limited the scope to places where human life is ‘at home,’ where it is
not in transit or literally held captive, giving priority to close-reading
rather than exhaustive exemplification, and to highlight how these
particular episodes build up to the final narrative to be discussed here.
That narrative, one which encompasses the sixth and most recent
volume High Tide at Midnight (Id. 2014), revisits these earlier plots and
places, if only to drown them in the mythic narrative of the great
‘cleansing’ flood.


                            A Corpse-Eye View
     Foucault historicizes the relocation of the cemetery from the
center to the outer borders of the city in terms of a growing bourgeois,
atheistic fear of death, wherein death is perceived as contagion that
propagates itself to the living (1986: 6). A similar relocation cannot be
claimed directly in relation to Philippine cemeteries, due partly to the




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strong cultural maintenance of the cult of the dead 1, and partly to the
urban sprawl that engulfs whatever could be considered ‘suburban’—a
term not often employed locally. If one takes Metro Manila as a unit,
then large cemeteries or ‘Memorial Parks’ clearly lie within that city’s
boundaries. The city of Manila, for example, is flanked by the Manila
North Cemetery, La Loma Catholic Cemetery, and Manila Chinese
Cemetery to the north, while to the south are Manila South Cemetery
and the Makati Cemetery. Even cemeteries once deemed far flung have
been engulfed by urbanization and now repose at the ‘heart’ of the
greater city; such is the situation of Libingan ng mga Bayani2 which,
alongside the Manila American Memorial Park and the Heritage Park,
line the main arterial highway known as C5.
      In Trese, the titular Kalayaan Street refers to the road that runs
alongside Manila South Cemetery. The situation within is borrowed,
however, from the North Cemetery. It is there that informal settlers are
perennial: such residents serve as care-takers of mausoleums and even
tour guides to visitors to what is, after all, a historical site.
      The plot of “The Outpost on Kalayaan Street” starts out simply
enough: a dead body is found in the cemetery and the police must
investigate. They uncover a painted ‘buhay na bato’, referred to also as
a summoning stone3, and soon learn what the stone summons: the
dead. Zombies invade the police outpost, and eventually it is revealed
that Raul Lazaro, a man recently apprehended for vandalism, had
summoned zombies to exact his revenge on the sergeant. The sergeant
had, according to Raul, allowed his thirteen-year-old brother,
Benjamin, to be killed in a hold-up, responding only once the


     1   The days of the dead, collectively called ‘Undas’, include a
commercialized Halloween (Oct. 31), and traditional holidays: ‘Todos los
Santos’ or All Saint’s Day (Nov. 1), and ‘Undas’ or All Soul’s Day (Nov. 2).
      2 The Cemetery for Military and National Heroes, where recently the

remains of the dictator Marcos were interred despite public outrage.
      3 ‘Living
                  Stone’; This culturally-informed motif popularized in
Philippine comics by Darna, whose powers are ‘summoned’ by swallowing
such a stone. Trese pays tribute to this local superhero in an earlier narrative.


                                                                                    5
Ana Micaela Chua Manansala, Communal Homes and Heterotopic Contagion in Trese



murderers had fled. Trese destroys the stone, apprehends Lazaro, and
advises against the reinstatement of the sergeant in order to avoid a
backlash from the underworld, which could easily finish him off by
doing «what Lazaro wasn’t able to do» (Tan – Baldisimo 2008: 44).




Figure 1. The lowered point of view hints at a reversal of power. (Tan – Baldisimo 2008: 24-
25; red marks added for emphasis)

      The zombie outbreak—death become contagious—can easily be
read as a comment on police irresponsibility and the consequences of
justice delayed and denied. Though Raul Lazaro’s plot is eventually
foiled, the reversals of power and the panoptic gaze, played out as
domination and invasion of space, is played out visually across the
scenes in the cemetery.
      In the opening spread, the title page mirrors the bottom
‘establishing’ panel. Captions give primacy to time: denoting the hour,
the sergeant’s years of service, the time before his retirement, the


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                                             Between, vol. VIII, n. 15 (Maggio/May 2018)



infrequency of arrests, and what does transpire “most times” (ibid.: 25).
The mise-en-scène of the title page and its double suggests the
policeman’s view: if the sightline is not at level with the sergeant’s
gaze, it comes from above, looking down at the newly apprehended
miscreant. This is momentarily but irrevocably reversed by the bottom
panel. The ‘PULIS’ sign, which marks the outpost, ‘overlooks’ the
cemetery, and yet the outpost does not hold a panoptic gaze. The field
of vision is lowered sufficiently to the point that the crosses on the
graves rise above the buildings across the road.




            Figure 2. A corpse provides focalization for previous pages.
            (Tan - Baldisimo 2008: 26; red marks added for emphasis)

      This worm’s eye view can be called a ‘corpse-eye view’ with little
irony as the sequence of panels on the next page assume the view from
the other side. The view is now over the wall, and the near abstract
illustration suggests the inability to distinguish makeshift houses from
graves. The sequence of panels then clarifies the scene that is being set.



                                                                                      7
Ana Micaela Chua Manansala, Communal Homes and Heterotopic Contagion in Trese



The cinematic effect of ‘zooming’ in, accompanied by verbal directions
of what to seek out in the panel, highlights the inability to distinguish
house from grave; then, the difficulty of distinguishing the presence of
a body among the graves although the shanties have become more
conspicuous; and finally, to distinguish that there is a body, and it is a
corpse—the living «joining the dead all too soon» (ibid.: 26). The rolled-
up eyes provide that upward gaze that, poetically if not literally,
provides a point of focalization for the first page.
      As heterotopic space, the Philippine cemetery is not only
described by synchrony as historical site and sacred space of the dead,
but also by its simultaneous use as a communal home space. Foucault,
after all, indicates that the notions that «everyone has a right to her or
his own little box for her or his own little personal decay» alongside
the growing fear of death as contagion, are «bourgeois appropriations»
of the cemetery (1986: 6). Here we see a refraction of that fear: to live in
poverty is to live close to death.
      The cemetery not only remains sacred and immortal to a degree, it
is other than Foucault’s «other city, where each family possesses its
dark resting place» (ibid.). The material reality of extreme poverty,
homelessness, and informal settlements in Manila, alongside the
cultural concepts of familial piety, complicate the situation. The
cohabitation of the living and their dead describes a portion of society
that cannot afford to remove itself from this contagion of death. The
poor are not assured of their own little boxes, so they shelter amongst
the boxes of others; their personal decay, as it were, begins even as
they live, under the public gaze, and in public spaces.
      What would otherwise be vague dialogue is contextualized by the
heterotopic function of the cemetery within this particular Philippine
reality: the detectives’ first command is to «evacuate the place of all
civilians», the response to which is that the «people don’t want to
leave! They think we’re going to demolish their houses» (Tan –
Baldisimo 2008: 29-31). Indeed, before the zombies cross the road, they
increase their numbers by chewing on some of the living. The presence
of a crowd of civilians within the cemetery, of possible victims
seemingly waiting around to be attacked by zombies, is not a


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contrivance of plot inserted to provide maximum action. It is based on
the reality that informal settlers do not see the police as their friends
and the threat of demolition and displacement is more real than a call
to evacuation due to a zombie attack.
     Lazaro’s vengeance for his own defenseless dead is a revenge
fantasy that requires not only a reversal of power from the police to the
poor imprisoned man, but an unearthing of the sacred so that it may
redress the oversights of secular justice. The concept of resurrection,
signaled by his surname, extends even to the stone that comes to life,
that which in turn brings the dead back to life.




Figure 3. Hierarchy of motifs is reversed as the dead come to life. (Tan – Baldisimo 2008:
30-31; red marks added for emphasis.)


     Throughout these pages, the mausoleums always tower above the
police. This may be objectively true for some of the larger monuments,


                                                                                        9
Ana Micaela Chua Manansala, Communal Homes and Heterotopic Contagion in Trese



but the visual hierarchy is primarily symbolic—an example of this can
be seen when the crucifixes dominate the panel establishing its relation
to the police station.
      Given a typical hierarchization of motifs4, in which the policemen
are assumed to be the “central” objects of the diegesis—moving plot
with their action and dialogue—and the graves as “secondary” by
virtue of being a redundant background, the rising of the zombies
shifts our interpretational attention entirely. What is dead or inanimate
becomes central to the reader’s attention, and the invasion of the dead
can be seen as having begun as a visual domination of sacred over
secular forces, even before the corpses resurface.
      The presence of the sacred, dressed in Catholic symbolism, is
further emphasized by the presence of the guardian angel silhouetted
in the background. These angels and crucifixes exist as ironic
reiteration of the failed guardianship of the outpost itself. The
significance of this motif is reiterated when a stone cherub gazes out of
the closing panels of the episode: in the same panel, Trese’s voice
transforms from dialogue—in balloons—to unboxed captions, in
quotation marks, further obscuring the source of the verbal warning
that «The underworld is not as forgiving as others» (ibid.: 44). The
invocation of the sacred dead is thus represented as the final recourse
for justice within a dysfunctional society where the living are unable to
protect themselves. There is irony in the notion that the dead are more
willing to evacuate their homes to help out in a cause not their own.
Neither the police, safe in their outpost, nor the tenants, perennially at
risk among the graves, heed the call when it is raised.
      This dysfunctional relationship between authorities and citizenry
is exposed by the zombies uprising, which becomes a seemingly
indisputable crossing over of meaning: the delivery of one man’s
grievance. Indeed, after the zombies rise from their graves and threaten
to cross the binding, the simplicity of their purpose is further
emphasized when they cross the road—a panel in which the bird’s eye

      As employed by Groensteen in System of Comics when he discusses the
      4

concept of redundancy in the work of Michel Tardy (2007: 116).


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                                       Between, vol. VIII, n. 15 (Maggio/May 2018)



view renders them indistinguishable from living human bodies (ibid.:
39)—and invade the outpost, where their summoner sits safely behind
bars.
      Lazaro’s story, after all, is also a tale of the criminalization of
poverty: that Raul is more akin to and more sympathetic to the dead
than to the living lends a sour note to the resolution of the case. The
poor man’s need to resort to myth, in the sacred, in the underworld—a
need premised on the inability of human authorities to provide
justice—is plagued by the insecurity of that institution even to the end
of the story. It is both sad and prophetic, when Trese asks the relatively
capable ‘good cop’ Captain Guerrero whether he thinks covering up
the incident as a gang war would be believed. She asks: «How will you
explain all the unearthed graves?» to which he replies that «we can
always say they were high on drugs, that always works» (ibid.: 44).


                    Bedspace and Bathwater
      Foucault describes crisis heterotopia as «privileged or sacred or
forbidden places, reserved for individuals who are, in relation to
society and to the human environment in which they live, in a state of
crisis» (1986: 4). As examples, he identifies spaces where adolescent
sexuality can be negotiated outside of the immediate view of
censorious society. While the boarding houses described by Foucault’s
are situated in a different historical and cultural milieu, the boarding
houses in Trese can still be read as crisis heterotopia for the youthful,
transient ‘middle-class’ that are students.
      Student dormitories are rented spaces, temporary homes, often
shared with others. “Wanted: Bedspacer” is a colloquial vacancy sign
for boarding houses wherein bed-space—the smallest unit of privacy
in what is otherwise a communal home—is rented out; ‘bedspacer’ is
the person taking up that space. What marks residents of such spaces
are their status, seemingly reducible to the categories of ‘young’ and
‘student’, from which we can imagine what sort of crises they must




                                                                               11
Ana Micaela Chua Manansala, Communal Homes and Heterotopic Contagion in Trese



undergo. “Wanted Bedspacer” is a story of heartbreak infecting
‘dormers’ via water consumption, that is, through the plumbing.
     The opening panels of the episode establish some of the important
narrative sites: the building’s façade in one panel, with its rooftop
water tank, where we spy the silhouette of a character whose
significance will be revealed later (Tan – Baldisimo 2011: 51). The next
spread establishes the mystery around which the case revolves,
presenting a cross-section of the building, as is made clear by the
addition of the building’s façade in the inside border of the page (ibid.:
52-53). Here the formal functions of the frame5 invites us, in
Groensteen’s words, «to stop and scrutinize» (2007: 54).
     Panels on this page demonstrate a doubly separative function:
formally separating panels while also denoting rented rooms. The
interstitial spaces or gutters—clearly outlined and white—serve as
figurative walls, ceilings, or floors. Only the bleeding out of furniture
from each room keeps us from assuming that the walls are literal or
properly scaled; it remains ambiguous whether the captions—a radio
broadcast with canned laughter—indicate narrative time or
simultaneous action throughout this section of the building.
     Chronological narration does move across the spread, however,
and the third page shows the action of the three friends that serve as
central characters to the mystery’s prologue. This is made clear by the
rhythmic repetition of their ‘room’—a frontal action to action panel
sequence that shows the result of their activity in and around the
bathroom—which is then followed by a series of tilted perspectives
moving them out to the balcony. We notice the change in mood and
helplessly watch as, after an extended gutter, a structural sense of
needless displacement, the three boys jump off the page in an
unmotivated act of suicide.




      5
       Following also Groensteen’s discussion of the spatio-topical system,
2007: 39-57.


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                                              Between, vol. VIII, n. 15 (Maggio/May 2018)




Figure 4. The cross-section allows interstitial spaces to serve as panels borders and
walls. (Tan – Baldisimo 2011: 52-53; red marks added for emphasis)

     The story later reveals, in an elaborate disputation between Trese
and a doctor, that all those in the boarding house who were exposed to
tap water were thus infected by the ‘bangungot’, a creature of
Philippine mythology whose typology Alexandra explains in great
detail (Tan – Baldisimo 2011: 55-59). In the world of Trese, the
bangungot is a fair, sorrowful, paralyzing creature of nightmare: it
clings to a man who suffers, feeding off his misery until he dies, and
she dissipates as an effect of the death of her host. In this specific plot,
a heartbroken boy—the same one texting his ex-girlfriend while sitting
atop the water tank—succumbs to the bangungot, who in turn melts
into the water supply, effectively becoming the untraceable drug that
infects all other residents with sorrow equivalent to their exposure of
tap water. The students either go into a comatose state or commit
suicide.




                                                                                      13
Ana Micaela Chua Manansala, Communal Homes and Heterotopic Contagion in Trese



      The tale ends with Trese conducting a séance to exorcise the
bangungot in the hospital ward, the comatose students laid out in a
circle around her, each laid out on their own individual hospital bed
(ibid.: 70). This is comparable to Foucault’s psychiatric ward (1986: 5)
where youthful heartbreak and depression become ultimate signs of
deviance and withdrawal. Here the detective switches to her role as
‘babaylan’ or priestess whose work is not individualized, but rather
takes the form of communal ritual, restoring each victim to his or her
rightful place in living society.
      The plot here emphasizes how a personal state of crisis, a boy’s
being jilted, becomes a communal condition. The dormitory is an
adolescent crisis heterotopia which serves also as a cultural microcosm
of the alienation of modern urban life6, where personal achievement—
“We passed our exams!” (Tan – Baldisimo 2011: 51)—seems walled off
from another’s personal despair. But the walls only seem impermeable.
These emotional and academic crises and victories exist
simultaneously and interact as parts of the common lived experience of
student life—a life lived away from home, where the social linkages
between peers who live proximal lives have more impact on the
student that his or her own familial relations or social standing.
      The use of the term gutter is thus fitting. The use of space,
diegetically and extra-diegetically, through mise-en-page, likewise
emphasizes the permeability of the walls or panels, and how the
plumbing or gutters in fact serve as conduits rather than separators.
Just as Scott McCloud uses the term gutter to denote spaces between
panels, his use of the term closure—the phenomenon of “observing the
parts but perceiving the whole” (1993: 63)—is particularly appropriate
to this narrative. What is concealed by the gutters in and of the comic is
the shared plumbing which links back to the same water supply. More
than perceptual closure between panels on the page, it is this
perception of the building as a whole, rather than the observation of
particular rooms and unrelated occupants, that allows the mystery to

      6
       As described by Georg Simmel in "The Metropolis and Mental Life"
(2002: 11-19).


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be resolved. This ‘invisible’ network is exposed as the relation between
people who seemingly live unrelated lives, but who in fact draw life
not only from the same water reservoir on the roof, but also from the
same reserve of narratives of personal crisis that many young people
think they must, paradoxically, bear and suffer alone.
      Water tanks are common installations around Metro Manila. They
are necessitated by the scarcity or inefficiency of city-wide water
supply and distribution in a city that is, paradoxically, prone to
flooding. This installation is meant to supply clean water to spaces
such as kitchens and bathrooms, spaces where the discourses of
cleansing and contamination, sustenance and survival, reign supreme.
One such space would be the shared bathroom. In the two episodes
that feature the dormitory, the dipper or ‘tabô’ makes its appearance,
hinting not only at the lack of a decent shower or water pressure, but
also at the rationed consumption of clean water. There is a need to
displace clean water from one part of the bathroom to another, or over
specific body parts in isolation, so as not to waste one’s limited share.
      In High Tide at Midnight, where another set of students live in a
different boarding house7, the difference between flood water and bath
water is emphasized. The former is the source of leptospirosis—
infection, disease, death—the second is used for cleansing oneself of
the risk of such infection. It is considered common sense to wash one’s
legs and feet after wading through a flood—that is, to get oneself wet
again soon after getting out of the water—and this is what Janjan does
as soon as she gets home. Similarly, it is common experience that
produces the informal ‘tawiran’ or bridge that allows Janjan to cross
the flooded streets.
      As a home, the in-betweenness of the dormitory space is rendered
at once as a middle class “privilege”; a home away from home, not as

     7
      Students in “Wanted Bedspacer” reside along Katipunan avenue, in a
boarding house that probably caters to Ateneo de Manila and University of
the Philippines, in Quezon City; this much is made clear by the ghost map.
Students in High Tide at Midnight are from The University of Santo Tomas, in
Manila, the location of which is notoriously prone to floods.


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Ana Micaela Chua Manansala, Communal Homes and Heterotopic Contagion in Trese



desirable as the family home, but better than homelessness; a space
which affords the student a degree of privacy, but not much ownership
or entitlement. Janjan does carry such insecurities with her, but the
narrative only suggests its greater relevance later on: when the
commentary in Janjan’s head describes how «the rats come scampering
out. Desperately swimming for their survival. We ignore the rats and
never notice how they slip underwater and never resurface. Swallowed
by the dark waters of the city» (Tan – Baldisimo 2014: 4) what slips out
of sight are three boys who must have thought it safe to swim in the
flood. When the captions tell us of Janjan’s longing to graduate, which
would allow her to «move out of this place» (ibid.: 5), it describes her
longing for a proper home that is not ritually invaded by floodwaters.
It does not mean that she would rather be rid of her roommates, who
die while she is in the bathroom.
     Janjan, with her adolescent crises and fear of rats and
leptospirosis, almost ends up sacrificed to the dark waters of Manila, a
cruel plot twist enabled by the sort of privileged entitlement linked not
to the real experiences of the “elsewhere” of crisis heterotopia, but the
unreal expectations projected towards the “nonplace” of utopia.




 Figure 4. Janjan’s misgivings reflect, to lesser degree, the same ideology that would
 condemn even her to becoming fish food. (Tan – Baldisimo 2014: 4)




              Electrified Fences and Power Outages
     The third living space is actually a collection of homes into the
‘exclusive subdivision’, a Philippine colloquialism referring to gated


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residential communities. Subdivisions are often upper-middle to
upper-class areas. They are ‘developed’ private lands which are walled
in and gated up. Again, these are not necessarily suburban, as they
take up prime spaces both within and outside urban centers. The
subdivision is the typical formal residential marker before the rise of
luxury condominium living: it has a gate, a guard house, requires
sticker-passes for access, and usually has a ‘club house’ where
amenities such as pools, conference halls, playgrounds, and a chapel or
church are available for community use.
     The conflict in “The Association Dues of Livewell Village”
revolves around such a hyper-exclusive culture, and the concepts of
home security and human sacrifice that inform it. Of all the cases
discussed so far, this story lends itself best to classical notions of
mythic relations between gods and men, the sacred and the profane. It
echoes the continued relevance of so-called sanctified or ‘blessed’ space
that is the typical, or ideal, home as well as the concept of utopia,
against which Foucault primarily defines heterotopia. It also carries
with it the sort of delineation that defined an older colonial Manila, one
that was divided between the inclusionary space, called «Intramuros—
within the walls—and, conversely, […] the exclusionary space called
Extramuros—outside the walls» (Reed in Lico 2003: 22).
     The plot is revealed thus: the residents of Livewell Village have
agreed to offer up periodic human sacrifices to Bagyon Kulimlim 8 to
ensure that they literally ‘live well’, protected from power outages and
ravages of typhoons. These residents eventually ascribe all good
fortune to the patronage of the deity; meanwhile, the coroner and Trese
must deal with the series of scorched corpses the bargain produces.




     8
       A member of the Storm or Bagyon clan, his name translates roughly to
‘overcast’. There is also Bagyon Lektro, his father, whose name is derived
from electricity, and Bagyon Yente, derived from ‘kuryente’, also meaning
electricity.



                                                                                17
Ana Micaela Chua Manansala, Communal Homes and Heterotopic Contagion in Trese



      The black and white, high-contrast style of Trese in general and
the arrangement of graphic motifs in this particular case give emphasis
to the dichotomy between light and darkness. In this episode it follows
the logic of ‘power’ and ‘power outage’, but motifs, characters, and
indeed themes established in these earlier volumes are in fact braided
all throughout the series, despite even Kajo Baldisimo’s evolving style.




Figure 5. Bars and sightlines reiterate the theme of division and sacred offering. (Tan –
Baldisimo 2008: 69 -70; red marks added for emphasis)



     The blocking, or indeed gridding, complements this thematic
opposition in at least two ways: first, it reflects notions of the home as
bright, harmonious, and secure, while the outside world is dark,
overcast, and hostile. Second, it emphasizes moments of division
between people: those who offer and those who are offered, the living
and the would-be dead. In the fourth panel of the story’s first page, we


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                                        Between, vol. VIII, n. 15 (Maggio/May 2018)



see the repairman on one side of the panel, black on white, and the
family on the other, white on black against the backdrop of their homes
(Tan – Baldisimo 2008: 69).
      In the same panel there are two important motifs—the electric
pole as crucifix, black on white, and the sidewalk fence, white on black.
Such motifs appear across the episodes of Trese discussed in this paper:
the use of vertical bars in the form of fences and of prison bars,
pointing to concepts of segregation both as a matter of security and of
isolation, depending on what it keeps in or out, but always—like the
walls and gutters—a supposed keeping apart.
      In this episode, the fences denote the sanctified space that requires
securing. But electric poles and electric lines also divide or strike across
panels to reinforce divisions and hierarchies across society. Livewell
village presents a utopic vision of the good family life, but it is also
heterotopic space where the village reimagines itself as a cultic temple
within which ritual sacrifice can be offered to a patronizing god. We
realize that Livewell village is particularly inhospitable, precisely
because it has no respect for its guests, disposing of one every year.
This does not always occur publicly: the coroner describes two
previous electrocutions, one from a blow-dryer and another involving
a short-circuited water heater, that happen during private moments
when victims are going about their private ablutions, again, in the
bathroom. It is the outsider who is sacrificed for the greater good; this
is, primarily, what makes the residents’ relations with the typhoon lord
criminal, and thus brings the whole affair into Trese’s jurisdiction.
      Like in “Wanted Bedspacer” there is also a sense of verticality
here, but not a structural verticality that allows the social ‘cascade’ in
the former. Rather this is the mythic vertically that links the heavens
with the earth via the lightning bolt. There are at least two references to
celestial intervention: lighting striking the tree and lightning striking
the electrical post upon which the repairman is mounted, after the
same post is set up as a crucifix by previous panels. These vertical
relations can thus be related to sacred ritual, particularly ritual
sacrifice, that mediate between the upward gaze of the residents of
Livewell Village—«We are so blessed, we must say thanks» (ibid.: 73)—


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Ana Micaela Chua Manansala, Communal Homes and Heterotopic Contagion in Trese



and the downward gaze of Typhoon Lord Bagyon Kulimlim. This is
reiterated by Kulimlim’s own rhetoric:


         On the fourth night, I heard the people of Livewell. I heard
      their wishes, their prayers. […] They pleaded to have their
      airconditioned rooms back, their 24-hour cable TV, and their ice
      cold softdrinks. Then I saw one man climb a tree. I took it as an
      offering. (Ibid.: 81)


     On the printed page, the lightning bolt is not clearly directional: it
moves downward to ‘hit’ an object, but moves upward to ‘take’ a life,
which has been offered up as the human cost of utopia. It is worth
noting that it is the residents’ idea to sacrifice an outsider once a year,
as Bagyon Kulimlim notes that he is not «a picky god» (ibid.: 82).




                                                                      Figure 7.
                                                                      Gaze and
                                                                      Directionality
                                                                      (Tan - Baldisimo
                                                                      2008: 81; red
                                                                      marks for
                                                                      emphasis)




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                                        Between, vol. VIII, n. 15 (Maggio/May 2018)



      Alexandra Trese exposes Bagyon Kulimlim as false god, a truant
son-of-a-CEO that has struck an under-the-table arrangement with
Livewell Village. The typhoon lords—the underworld syndicate
behind typhoons—have as their front a corporation known as the
Maharlika Electric Company. This is a clear reference to Meralco, the
monumental façade of which is identified quietly on page 76. Indeed,
the referents of most underground powers in Trese are corporations
and crime syndicates—comprising both black market and the
legitimate fronts or large private enterprises. On the comic page, this
iconic façade also translates into a series of vertical bars. This is but a
glimpse of a larger social issue: the privatization of public utility
services.
      Power, manifesting as the electricity that enables the ideal use of
the home space, functions as an allegory of Power, now as ideological
construct. Here lies exposed how the control of public utilities, the
modes of production, of capital, masquerades as the sacred relations
between celestial authority and earthly mortals. The story exemplifies
the dangerous understanding that the provision of basic needs
‘naturally’ involves private companies making exclusive deals or
contracts with private homeowners or individuals. The interest in
profit is disguised. The notion that people have the “right to light”—
that is, to be provided basic public services—is revoked when public
utilities are made to serve the needs of a privileged few. The bargain
with Bagyon Kulimlim—illicit human sacrifice—serves first of all the
desire of the provider rather than the select consumers, who would not
require such a loophole if they were sufficiently provided for in the
first place. Even then, the chasm between the rich or the insecure
upper-middle class—who lament the loss of their air-conditioning—
and the working and impoverished classes—whose lives are lived
close to the grave—defines to whom such additional privileges are
offered and who, in the final computation, is made to pay the price.
When Trese exclaims that people are dying, Kulimlim responds with
familiar rhetoric: «People dying? You make it sound like an epidemic.
Only one person dies every year» (ibid.: 80-81).



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Ana Micaela Chua Manansala, Communal Homes and Heterotopic Contagion in Trese



     The concept of the primacy of family in its bourgeois formulation,
foundation even to oligarchic nepotism, is exposed as a brand of
communal selfishness: it is through such narrow views of social
success that people justify their disregard of the lives of others.
     The utopic space of Livewell Village, which offers itself as
«present society itself in a perfected form» (Foucault 1986: 3) is thus
exposed in Trese as a dangerous fantasy of the easy life. It is a
distortion of the concept of community, inasmuch as it is premised on
exclusion rather than inclusion. Utopia is at once desirable and
dangerous to society at large because it elides its own exclusive nature,
thus serving to conceal the power structures on which it is borne. As a
living space, it designates itself as the space that must at all costs be
maintained, and its human elements as those whose lives are valuable
a priori and who thus deserves to live well, while simultaneously
offering up as equivalent value the lives of those it deems dispensable.


                              City as Synthesis
       The city, Metro Manila, embraces all these home spaces. High
Tide at Midnight brings together such meaningful structures—
narratological, semiotic, referential—to a climactic and indeed epic
scale, exploding the confines of private spaces to deal with the city as
home. The story is grounded in the rhetoric of mythmaking during the
Martial Law era as it is eloquently broken down by Gerard Lico, in his
landmark work Edifice Complex (2003).
       High Tide at Midnight features the literal flooding of Manila, the
figurative outpouring of the supernatural criminal underground onto
human reality, and the ideological concept of social cleansing. It also
features Trese’s most formidable nemesis to date: the Madame,
ambassador of Manila, a thinly veiled reference to the late dictator’s
wife, Imelda Romualdez Marcos.
     Here is one version of the conflict: during the yearly ordeal that is
the monsoon season, aquatic monsters invade a flooded Manila,
indiscriminately murdering and consuming hapless citizens. These



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                                                  Between, vol. VIII, n. 15 (Maggio/May 2018)



monsters are ‘Taga-dagat’—from the sea—who are supplied with a
dangerous drug called “shift” which allows them to metamorphize
into more powerful creatures. In its culmination, they “shift up” into a
monster, Datu Rakuda, who rises from the sea that was once Manila
(Tan – Baldisimo 2014: 116).




Figure 6. Inside and outside of homes, as conflict escalates.


     The flooding, which invade the dormitories and the private
homes, reflect the violent incursions into daily ‘private’ life. Reprising
“Wanted Bedspacer” the constructed nature of the walls set up to
delineate home spaces are exposed as flimsy, as permeable, forcing a
redefinition of the use of spaces in as they force people to sit atop
tables or to climb up rooftops and to flee from their own homes.
     Again, here is a graveyard without boundaries, taking over the
realm of the living. Furthermore, it is a watery grave, even more fluid
and indiscriminate. The underworld overflows onto Manila, and we



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Ana Micaela Chua Manansala, Communal Homes and Heterotopic Contagion in Trese



are met with a city whose streets are literally inundated in the blood of
the innocent.
      Despite this infestation, this fear of infection, however, a boat of
immunity makes its way into the story, ushering in a plot twist and a
political allusion. Not only does the Madame ride past such
destruction with impunity and a show of her own bleeding heart, in
the climax of the story Bagyon Yente reveals how exactly this storyline
resembles that of bargain struck by Livewell Village: the Madame, as
ambassador of Manila, has offered as ritual sacrifice to Bagyon Yente
all of the criminal taga-dagat, after they have pillaged the living world
of Manila (ibid.: 126, 129).




Figure 7. Figurations of the Madame, in the image of Imelda Marcos. (Tan – Baldisimo
2014: 45, 130)

    This turns out to be a crucial step towards a utopic vision: on one
hand, it is a social cleansing of Manila, the taga-dagat and their drugs;


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on the other, it is a securing of the Bagyon clan’s promise to spare
Manila any more typhoons that year. In her final appearance, the
Madame watches the sun set on Manila Bay. It is all too painfully
ironic.
      The sea reclaiming Manila is its own mythic commentary on
Imelda’s project of reclamation: to be specific, this refers to her
expanding the city of Manila—or the “City of Man”—onto Manila bay,
producing the CCP complex (Lico 2003: 85). It was a project as grand in
both scale and folly—incurring incredible debt for the nation,
involving “slave-driving mechanics” and so many construction
workers buried alive in cement (ibid.: 123–6)—but stand to this day as
the monuments to the infrastructural achievements of that Regime.
Imelda reclaimed land not only from nature, however, but also from
people. Projects such as the Tondo Foreshore and Dagat-dagatan urban
development projects (ibid.: 65) were meant to cleanse and beautify
such sections of Manila—slums and ‘depressed’ areas—that did not
contribute to the vision of the “New Society”; and this trope, too, finds
its way to the closing scenes of Trese. After the blood and death has
been swept away, the Madame can admire the sunset from Manila Bay
and exclaim: “Clean Air! Don’t you just love that!” (Tan – Baldisimo
2014: 131).
      One may ask where the heroes of the comic series are, and how
they address this conflict. When Trese is episodic, it is most clearly
supernatural detective fiction involving lower mythology, but every
few volumes it explodes into the realm of the epic, exposing its
relations to the superhero genre. In this volume, Trese and the team of
heroes assembled around her fight to save citizens at the ground level:
throughout the comic they engage in battle played out under a
merciless curtain of rain—a reprise of repressive vertical bars which
resemble and sometimes alternate with motion lines—and the
backdrop of night. They are, for now, relatively helpless in this grand
scheme, even as though they do defeat the monstrous Datu Rakuda.
      The visual style of High Tide at Midnight could be described as
visually tiring, especially in comparison to the clean chiaroscuro of
previous volumes. This visuality of both storm and stress—in the text,


                                                                               25
Ana Micaela Chua Manansala, Communal Homes and Heterotopic Contagion in Trese



perhaps in the reader—renders the reading at once poignant and
unsavory, as such fatigue is the price of that constant battle required of
such heroes within and beyond the comic: how could so many heroes
team up to fight so great a threat and still secure no real victory? Like
the common citizen, Trese’s team earns only enough respite to have a
round of drinks with like-minded individuals at the end of a long day
of struggle. The crime narrative—which Trese, after all, remains—can
never have a truly happy ending. Always we must ask, when a vision
of utopia is proposed, what Alexandra asks the Madame: «At the cost
of how many lives?»
      It is Alexandra who enunciates the problem of this grand-scale
ritual sacrifice. It is power-hungry, fascist, populist rhetoric that
assumes as fitting payment for social security and “clean living” the
sacrifice, not of the self, but of others.
      The narratological function of spaces go beyond the establishment
of setting: in Trese all living spaces are portrayed as public spaces
where private lives unfold, intertwined with the life of the community.
They describe a kind of home life that is particularly contagious,
spreading laterally or cascading vertically, across the units of private
lives, through meaningful social structures—such as, plumbing,
electrical lines, or graves—thereby allowing the fantastic and the
criminal to contaminate and reconfigure the delineations that human
society imposes upon itself as ordering structure.
      When, finally, these spaces are seen in panorama—in the embrace
of the construct of the city—we must wonder what utopic illusions
enable us to imagine human experience as individual and thus
separate from the suffering of others, our homes as closed systems and
thus safe and secure, and our lives as intrinsically valuable and thus
owed to us by the powers that be. Even such literature as this provides
us no such comfort, no clear escape, allowing us instead to see the
struggle of narratives against each other—of even the smallest stories
of heartbreak and familial fears against grand myths of nature, nation,
and power. We are not meant to ‘feel at home’ in them or with them, if
being at home is to submit to the delusion that a space is only another
space, or a life only another life, and nothing more.


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                                       Between, vol. VIII, n. 15 (Maggio/May 2018)




                            Works Cited
Lico, Gerard, Edifice Complex: Power, Myth, and Marcos State Architecture,
     Quezon City, Ateneo de Manila UP, 2003.
Foucault, Michel, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias” (1967),
     trans. by Jay Miskowiec in Diacritics, 16.1 (1986): 22–7.
Groensteen, Thierry, The System of Comics, trans. by Bart Beaty and
     Nick Nguyen, Jackson, UP of Mississippi, 2007.
Massey, Doreen, For Space, London, Sage, 2005.
McCloud, Scott, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, New York,
     Harper Perennial, 1993.
Sangari, Kumkum, “The Politics of the Possible”, The Nature and
     Context of Minority Discourse, Eds. Abdul JanMohamed and David
     Lloyd, New York, Oxford UP, 1990: 216–45.
Simmel, Georg, “The Metropolis and Mental Life”, The Blackwell City
     Reader, Eds. Gary Bride and Sophie Watson, Oxford, Wiley-
     Blackwell, 2002: 11–9.
Tan, Budjette, and Kajo Baldisimo, Trese: Unreported Murders, Pasay,
     Visprint, 2008.
Id, Trese: Last Seen after Midnight, Pasay, Visprint, 2011.
Id, Trese: Hightide after Midnight, Pasay, Visprint, 2014.



                             The Author
Ana Micaela Chua Manansala

     Micaela is Assistant Professor at the Department of English and
Comparative Literature, University of the Philippines, where she
attained her M.A. in Comparative Literature. She has published and
presented multiple studies on Philippine comics. Her current research
involves the narratology of myth and adaptation in popular genres
across cultures and media, particularly in novels, comics, and anime.

      Email: micaelachua@gmail.com


                                                                               27
Ana Micaela Chua Manansala, Communal Homes and Heterotopic Contagion in Trese




                                   The Paper
Date sent: 15/03/2018
Date accepted: 30/04/2018
Date published: 30/05/2018



                        How to quote this paper
Chua Manansala, Ana Micaela, “Communal Homes and Heterotopic
Contagion in Trese”, Spazi tra le nuvole. Lo spazio nel fumetto, Eds. G.V.
Distefano, M. Guglielmi, L. Quaquarelli, Between, VIII.15 (2018),
http://www.Between-journal.it/




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