A Review of Rhea Gulin’s Hado Effect

The story of Ada dumped in an unusual family business - a business which you may need to call them aswang or tiktik for hire.

Hado effect reminds me of Jose Garcia Villa’s, a National Artist in Literature, “Footnote to Youth” where the Dodong’s family tree suffers a repetitive cycle of men drawn to puppy love, early marriage and heavy marital obligation. The point comparison is angled at the family tree cycle.

Excerpt:

“My grandmother summoned my two older brothers (who were spared in inheriting the family business).”

 Unlike Villa, Gulin took a feminine touch on the major characters since women bear the deviant familial business of abortion. I cannot fully arrive at a conclusion of the intertextuality between Gulin and Villa’s texts. One thing may be certain, the text are in a domestic color. The primary reason of which we belong to a family is to survive biologically and then sociological needs such as belongingness follows (see Maslow’s Pyramid of Human Needs). As we live with a family, we are trained to conform to societal conventions – that of which makes us civil than savage. It is therefore in family that we primarily derive civilization and humane acts. Ironically, Hado effect breaks this notion, since Ada learns to kill unborn humans through her family. One could even say that it does not only break this notion but a concept of a societal norm.

Sadly, Gulin’s fiction mirrors a real world of abortionists scattered over the globe. Some would be literally professionals of abortions and even work in hospitals. We are now reminded that we are gradually deviating to the human that we should be. Early humans of the past would have no historical accounts for such.

But why do we do we commit to such industry? The blameworthy of this inhuman act is Capitalism. We are skewed to act differently to accord not to society but to consumerism. Extreme capitalism and consumerism stifles the people that they surrender to unusual modes of livelihood. Priority, now, is angled to economic needs than life itself. Here, whatever means one takes as long as it justifies the end, becomes accepted. As Cirilo F. Bautista said in his poem (A man falls to his death), “Blood is nothing. Space is all. Is.”

Our society is geared to making money out of death. It is uneasy to think that the death itself becomes a commodity much like the things we buy in 7/11. Crap, life becomes a 9/11.

Did we see Ada attempt to jam the family’s system? No, since she was molded by her grandmother and mother to an extent of that in her very mind lies an assassin of the unborn. There was even no evident realizing of a self error. Ada, in fact, corrects herself by aligning to darkness.