America is Not the Heart

A parol

America is Not the Heart by Elaine Castillo

"What Hero loved most wasn't the cadre names people chose, but the word kasama itself: kisama, pikisama. In Ilocano, the closest word was kadwa. Kadwa, makikadwa. Companion, but that English word didn't quite capture its force. Kasama was more like the glowing, capricious form of the word with: with as verb, noun, adjective, and adverb, with as a way of life. A world of withing. In Isabela, Hero was with." (109)

The back cover blurb on my copy of America Is Not the Heart summarizes the novel as “a sprawling, soulful debut about three generations of women in one family grappling to balance the promise of the American dream and the unshakable grip of history.” While not untrue, such a sentence would not be my choice in terms of accurately portraying the novel’s spirit or even content. I would describe America Is Not the Heart more as “sprawling, soulful debut about one character’s attempts to heal after her capture and imprisonment in a state run camp in the Phillipines concomitantly led to the loss of the chosen family she’d found while a member of the New People’s Army. It is the story of how, after moving to the U.S., she reckons with her identity and sense of place, reclaims her powerful sexuality, finds and contributes to a new community, and realizes she still has the ability to love.

The novel is not just about Hero, the main character—that initial blurb sentence is right to nod to the presence of “three generations” as Paz, Hero’s Aunt, and Roni, her cousin, are indeed central, vital characters in their own right. However, the triad of Paz, Roni, and Hero isn’t the cornerstone of the novel. The truth is that this is a novel that is simultaneously about one powerful, sometimes even larger-than-life, character and about community. It’s about Hero—her heart, her mind, her body, her memories—and about the people who surround her, both as memories and as physical, current presences. It’s about Theresa, Amihan, and Eddie, Hero’s cadres in the New People’s Army, where she served for ten years as a doctor before capture and torture by the state force. It’s about Hero’s elite Filipino family, the De Veras, who disowned her upon her enlistment in the NPA, but it’s also about the family members who helped her despite everything: her Tita Soly in the Phillipines, her beloved Tito Pol and his wife Paz, who now live in California. It’s about Pol and Paz’s daughter, Roni, who comes to serve Hero as both an anchor and a balloon, keeping her grounded but also lifting her out of herself and her painful memories. It’s about Rosalyn and her extended family of relatives and friends, Filipino-Americans who’ve been living in the U.S. longer that Hero and who are willing to take her under their wing. It’s about Rosalyn, for whom Hero feels a dynamic range of emotions from instant crush to powerful lust to love.

Castillo’s writing is lyrical and clear. She vividly renders settings, emotions, and characters alike, pivoting between illustrating haunting inner worlds and writing funny, life-like dialogue as if it’s no big deal. As if that weren’t enough, the novel also works on big themes like nationalism and national identity, trauma, grief, and healing, classism, colorism, homophobia, and even humanity’s complex relationship with food. Though 400 pages long, I gulped the novel down greedily, hungry for each dimensional, rich facet offered up to the reader’s mind. Subjects this book includes that some readers may be sensitive to (but which others may be thrilled to find sensitively discussed in their literature): torture, death, homophobia.