Dumot and the art of being angry

Alan Navarra's sophomore release is called Dumot, a word which means two things. In Hiligaynon, it means “vindictiveness" and in French, it means "the word." Unlike Navarra's debut piece (it was almost called Razorblade Heart, but was released as Girl Trouble), it's not immediately clear what Dumot is all about. It is described as a book that "presents fragments of a man's aggression: his inner demons, his state of mind and physical being as he tries to make sense of the things inside his head while dealing with the rigors of working in a challenging atmosphere." As with Girl Trouble, Dumot contains the sort of prose that will get the author in trouble. Readers tend to wonder, is this fiction? This is actually the author speaking, isn't it? Navarra answers safely, saying Dumot is largely based on incidents and situations that he's been told of and/or has gone through himself. "I wouldn't say most of it was true though I can't say if some of it isn't either," he says. Dumot is the story of Michael Perez, a marketing & communications expert who has had it with his company. We become privy to Perez's strong feelings through several versions of his resignation letter, ranging from polite template wording to straight to the point: "I did my best. You f---ed it up. I'm leaving."

As far as wishing to leave one's job, Dumot is certainly something that a lot of people can relate to. But Perez is a particularly angry fellow, and it isn't necessarily for being able to sympathize with him that readers would be attracted to the book. For one, as Angelo Suarez points out in his foreword, Dumot is a book about design. That much is immediately obvious, as the 128 pages of black-and-white Helvetica goodness are unleashed under a cover that features the book's details in a small clean box. Behind it, not an inch is spared from the sprawling lines that twist and turn, snaking around and into each other. "He seems so angry about everything," a friend of mine commented after meeting the author. I realized this was not entirely untrue, but because Navarra has a way with words his anger comes across as harmless, and perhaps even charming. You have to admit, reading Dumot is tiring, but there are moments where you can't help but chuckle in delight at the cleverness of it all. In Dumot, Navarra first grapples with anger, then dances with it. He calls coming up with the book an interesting experience. "Process-wise, it involved not only facing "inner demons", but constructing them from scratch as well in the form of words and images, to give them some sort of life and contain them," he says. It isn't that Navarra's words can't stand alone. His images as well as the book's form itself - text arranged in ways that are reminiscent of forms and other office documents. The sentences pulse, the paragraphs pound, the entire text throbs.e documents - wrap around the words so that the experience of reading is intensified. It's alive, and it wants to eat you alive. Suarez warns that the book is "a drag in the sense that its anger is repetitious and exhausting." This is not necessarily a bad thing; in fact, Suarez goes on to say that the angry note with which the work begins is sustained "past the threshold of corny to the terrain of boring." “'Boring' is used here not derogatorily but w/ affection: Navarra’s work approaches the boredom of LeWitt, the redundancy of Kawara. It’s an almost Oulipian feat, stretching anger to book-length proportions, where keeping to anger functions as a compositional constraint," says Suarez. If LeWitt, Kawara and Oulipian don't mean anything to you, you can skip to the end where Suarez declares Dumot a triumph. He also calls it a sadomasochistic exercise in sterility, but for those who aren't prone to thinking too much about what they consume, Dumot can just as easily be appreciated for its novelty. "People might want to buy this book because I don't think there is anything like it out in the Philippine book market today. Of course I could be wrong," Navarra says, adding that the first few batches of Dumot come with some interesting freebies. If freebies aren't your kind of thing, perhaps a few excerpts from the book will be sufficient to lure you into getting a copy. Apart from dripping anger, some fragments of Dumot occasionally betray a strangely romantic side of Navarra - like other young, successful, smarter than the average party bears, he's bursting with ideas and he wants to change the world. But of course, suggestions on how to improve things still come in anger, such as a fragment with the heading "parang message sending failed kahit marami kang load." "Nabobo ka na ba? Napipikon ka? Pwes. Bumalik ka na dun, sa pag-padami ng friends, paramihan ng meron at ang pag-lista ng anumang nasa iyo na wala sa akin. Sana dumami ang carbohydrates sa katawan mong kasing-macho ng tambyolo. Sana kahit magkunwaring pulubi ka eh, malalaman pa rin ng lahat ang kadukhaan mo ay hindi sa labas kundi naka-ukit sa kalooban mo." Dumot also contains several examples of how to deal with text scammers. For instance, one can reply by saying, "This is Colonel James Dean Kirk of the Digital Scams Division for the Metro Manila Virtual Militia and I would like to inform you that through the GPS feature in your mobile device we are able to locate your whereabouts in real-time. Deleting this message and turning off your phone will not delay the iron arm of digital justice against the crimes you have been committing and are about to commit." Navarra throws in a good measure of poetry, too, with lines like "the mathematics of choosing, the geometry of loss." Although you're sure to find anger on every page, there is much to derive pleasure from - a lovely turn of phrase, a wicked illustration, or comfort in the strangeness of the office document format. With Dumot, Navarra makes art out of anger. It's a beautiful madness that's difficult to resist. - YA, GMA News Photos courtesy of Alan Navarra