Call Center Caper
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Book Review: The Quiet Ones: A Novel by Glenn Diaz (Ateneo De Manila University Press, 2017)
The novel dares to break the mold of how Filipinos are typically portrayed in contemporary stories. When I asked Glenn Diaz why he chose to name his work The Quiet Ones, he said, “The title signaled the collective experience that I wanted to portray and the idea played on a job requirement for a call center agent to be quiet and suffer or put up with routine verbal abuse, or to talk but only by following a predetermined script in a colonial language. To be a disembodied mouth and set of ears in the context of an empire.” Ultimately, the book “is preoccupied with speaking and orality and what they mean in relation to staying human amid dehumanization.”
Diaz’s brilliant exposition explores the notion of Filipinos as servile and uncultured as he reveals the nuances that bedevil personal relationships between haves and the have-nots. The novel begins with Alvin trying to abscond with millions of pesos from his call center job. Alvin is the epitome of a regular Filipino trying to overcome the clutches of capitalism, in the same way that a quiet man like Manny Pacquiao can subdue the foreign fists in the boxing ring. Hence, the title The Quiet Ones, meaning it is those who appear burdened by the impositions of capitalism that have the power to effectively manipulate the system in their favor. The qualities that allow true success in a capitalist order are grit, patience, and a plan achieved through solidarity.
Author Glenn Diaz (Source: The Johannesburg Review of Books)
The intricacies of how the funds are acquired are not revealed in exhaustive detail due to the character-driven nature of Diaz’s storytelling. The focus is on the four main players who share the loot: Karen, Eric, Philip, and Alvin, each receiving 4.1 million pesos (appx. $82,000). Alvin is the apparent mastermind of the operation, and his three colleagues help keep the operation undetected.
Alvin has a contentious relationship with Scott, an American on a Fulbright scholarship in Manila. Scott’s essay Manny Pacquiao and the Peculiar Happiness of Filipinos opens with singer Sarah Geronimo’s rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner before a fight. While Scott notes that the fight announcer, Michael Buffer, mispronounced her name, he makes no efforts to mention Sarah’s name. This symbolizes the many ways that Americans rely on outsourcing services to maximize profits, yet the Filipinos and Indians, the people of the global south, are essentially unmentioned in the celebration of maximized profits. This lack of regard and care is translated into Scott’s relationship with Alvin whose love for Scott is requited only in a sexual context, as if Scott cares little about Alvin’s feelings in the same way that Americans in the novel care very little for the humanity of individual Filipinos and see them only in the context of services rendered to the globalized order.
Scott regards Filipinos as nonsensical beings who partake of joy despite rampant poverty. It doesn't make sense to him.
“As an anthropologist, I was trained to think that all human transactions carried a resonance beyond itself, a world of culture and history embedded in every gesture. The Aristotelian definition of happiness anchors it on reason, which seems in the case of the Filipino variety, a little suspect, if not downright silly” (p.203)
This is a limited view. Happiness in the Philippine context is an expression of survival in a society’s stark division between wealth and poverty. Not everyone can beat the system like Alvin, so what exactly is the alternative? According to Diaz, “Corporate culture in general is an earnest, exhausting performance of productivity and relations and even ethics that mystifies and obscures the fact that it's just an operation after profit, while also incentivizing adherence to this ethos. To some extent the book is an attempt to think about ways to find either respite from, if not a way out of, this claustrophobic, fatal enclosure.”
Not everyone can beat the system like Alvin, so what exactly is the alternative?
In the novel, Carolina serves as the epitome of globalized racism. She is of Spanish origin and an executive in a medical research institute based in Australia. Her presence serves as a through- line from the open racism of the colonial past against the indigenous and those who bear the markings of indigenous ancestry to current poor who do not grasp the English language. She routinely refers to street children as “street urchins,” a sign of her internalized racist disposition toward the less fortunate. She sees Filipinos primarily through the lens of poverty, claiming to detest their over-obsequiousness while taking advantage of it.
Alvin is the most “revolutionary” of the characters. Yet he is the only one who gets caught. Diaz’s novel lets readers contemplate the meaning of happiness in the context of work at the bottom of the globalized capitalist pyramid. Can we change it? If we are to strive for a more humanizing future, is there a way to achieve justice within the bounds of the law? As a reader, I was left to believe that the primary mechanism to free oneself from the oppressions of capitalism is not to destroy it, but to outsmart it.
Elaine Joy Edaya Degale is a Black-Filipina writer and lecturer at community colleges within the City University of New York (CUNY), and has an Ed.M. and M.A. from Teachers College, Columbia University.
She graduated cum laude from Mount Holyoke College where she studied International Relations and Development, and continues to support literacy and food programming efforts in indigenous communities through her Community-Based organization, OperationMerienda.org.
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