Category: Reviews

"The Family That Eats Soil", as shown by its ultraviolent treatment, critiques the brutalized Filipino psyche: three hundred years of Spanish colonization, more than fifty years of American intervention, four years of Japanese rape, twenty four years of Marcos terrorism. And, despite the seeming absence of foreign invaders and despots, the Filipino's ordeal still has to find an ending. Brutalization is manifested in all the characters of this story, in the way they live and look at life. The family literally subsists on nothing but soil, but the peculiarity does not end there. Here, they raise the idea of dysfunction to strange new levels: Grandpa is a zombie. Father is a serial killer. Mother is a notorious/famous pimp, drug dealer, television personality. Brother is a violent anti-Chinese racist practicing brown supremacy and Sister is a drug-addled prostitute. What happens to Baby in the end gives a shocking conclusion to the absurdist-psycho surrealist tale. The story operates on several symbolic levels. The concept of 'family', for instance, is integral in so far as it remains a sacred unit in traditional Philippine society, where it is not unusual to find grandparents and dozens of grandchildren existing under one small, claustrophobic roof. On the other hand, the symbol of 'soil' can never be divorced from the Filipino consciousness. The Philippines remains, at heart, an agrarian society-- where the earth has always been a striking metaphor for essence and rootedness, a source of sustenance and spirit. However, 'The Family That Eats Soil', seeks to paint a dystopian portrait, a phantasmagoric reversal of Filipino values. It is an allegory for a people still walking and breathing under an unending nightmare.