( dreams )

Thursday, May 01, 2008

I promised I'd post this, and though I'm pretty hesitant (and embarrassed) about it, here is the notorious Palanca entry of mine:

PS: Yes, it's supposed to be that long. Tell me wachuthink, okay? And I mean all you lot.

The Filipino Substance

Before me stood a man. He had on a Lito Atienza Hawaiian-print shirt, big vintage Ray-bans, a fishing hat, and brown safari shorts. The cut in his shirt and trousers revealed a light, hairy undergrowth, which lay on rash-spotted skin. He looked over his shades, and asked me with cheery smiling eyes and a thick accent that did not exist anywhere in my hemisphere, “So. Where is it that you have planned for us to see?”

I sensed that he was mocking me. Indignantly, I heard myself say with a voice scorched in playful sarcasm. “What do you want to see, then?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he threw at me. “I believe I’ve heard of it all. The sands of Boracay, the ruins of Fort Santiago, even the odor—or should I say scent—of the Davaoeño Durian. Where, pray tell, do you plan to take this unwitting tourist, who I believe paid for a mind-boggling, once-in-a-lifetime all-Filipino tour of the native land?” And with that he waggled his eyebrows, not without a challenge, at me.

“Oh, dear sir,” I said, attempting a little waggle, not without a challenge, of my own. “This humble Pinay—whom you have hired to take you on a mind-boggling, once-in-a-lifetime all-Filipino tour of her native land—would like to take you somewhere special. So special, in fact, that you bought yourself a ticket to the only one of its kind.”

“Is that so, my lady? Well, then, we have all day. But this day alone.”

“Then we should get started. This way, follow me, please.”

Take a stranger by hand. Where you bring him speaks not only about the place, but of you as well. Therefore, you make well of what you tell him, and what he sees.

What does the motherland consist of? Is it the standing of its leader? Is it the cry of its people? Is it its wealth in the market, or its attraction to foreigners? I believe it is not of the content this generation boasts of; not of the beauty of its beaches nor the abundance of its night life, nor the production of its talent, nor the expanse of its sea of beautiful faces. No, it is not what we can offer to the West that they may find pleasing. Neither is it how we boast about these islands in our midst here in the East. This is superficial, alluring yet hollow.

Rather, it consists of, in a word, substance.

But as a Filipino, it is quite hard to seek and find the Pinoy substance. It cannot be seen in the light, at a glance, in an instant anymore. We no longer pass by the trees that have stood against time and proven hardiness, but in its place stand the sleeping concrete buildings, sterile of fruit and lacking true testament of living strength. The stirrings in the black eyes of the small Malayan faces inspire no more, stabbed to death to be keeper by a tainted, sad hopelessness that does not resemble our own. Our men carry weapons for killing, as opposed to hunting for food, and therefore we go hungry and dull and listless; our women possess no more the gift of sweetness and pure beauty, but a harassed, forceful will that is the last pulse in her heart that keeps her living. Sabotaged by wealth, and greed, and pride, and being thrown aside as without selfhood and root, we have been forced to trade our humanity and retreat into becoming rocks of cold, sullen routine of life, if only to keep breathing.

Where is the Philippines? What face, what surface, what do we have to show for the years of labor and strife and warfare we have given? The sweat and blood and hopes of our fathers, have they been in vain? May we be called dead? Not only as a corpse, but disintegrated without memory—oh, we cannot live like ghosts. We are still alive, breathing heavily under the six feet of soil which we were buried under, in suppression of the life we once fought for, and are fighting for. Aren’t we? Many have given in to the enemy, and traded their songs for guns and daggers by which to kill their ancestors. Some have refused to fight and died in the battle. But to those remaining not only with breath but with ever longing love for his mother's race, they are the substance that has lived in the past, and lives to this day.

We are what we were born from, and came from, and fought for.

That ancient story of the Malayan diaspora, their scattering to the seven thousand isles, their establishment and thriving that was our beginning. The trade of the Arabs and the Chinese, led not only to exchanging goods but also to bartering their fibers to our identity. The Spanish and Japanese conquest, that made us to taste sorrow, death and war, and to desire justice but not know it, and to commit crimes and spew blood on the land and sobs into the air and innocence out of our fragile hearts, to need and want freedom that was taken from our ignorance that was bliss of living, to seed and sprout bitterness, hatred, and loss. The American occupation that we were convinced led to so-called awakening. Did they give us brotherly knowledge, or like the Forbidden Fruit, instead gave us the health of good and evil and made us selfish, wanting more of what we do not have? We have permitted them to dominate our lands and set flag in the conscious wake of our people.

And then the Filipino looks back, and sees that his fellow soldiers have lost their footing in the bombardment of abuse of our vacant existence and fallen out of the race, only to find that they have vanished.

So where do you lead the stranger to? Is he to see our shame and failure?

No.

We have yet a victor.

The simple, humble countryman who looks back, sees his troop fall around him, and for the love of their sake keeps running for the prize. He is the man who has embraced his heritage and continues to live in the present for his generations. He is the man who has not forgotten his heroes and turned away from the abomination of corruption and poverty, but whose heart continues to quiver for his mud-smeared bloodied brothers and their broken dreams, making them his own and living for their hope. He may be the man who gathers the garbage in the morning, or he who carries a briefcase to work and walks in polished leather shoes, so long as he is the man who comes home at sunset to his family and will come face to face with his God and wash his hands to an honest vocation.

This is a Filipino, aptly called by his substance.

To take foreign eyes into the heart of our substance, and have him see it not by its microscopic specks but something we can proudly refer to as our own, we must find a place where this substance abounds.

I find this place in the heart of a Filipino. Yes, the heart of our substance is in the heart of a Filipino. Take him that was a stranger to you, to a stranger to him, and let him hear. The battle for freedom of his forefathers, and the battles of life he had seen and soldiered in. The rally of the cries for justice at EDSA, and the cries he had borne. The penitence of faith, and how he has kept it by the endless hours of prayer in Quiapo. The tradition of love within families, and that within his own. How the sun had baked his skin in the long hours of work, sweat trickling as the grains of rice he earns to feed his house. All the life and world of the Philippines, in a Filipino. It may be a grandfather, a teacher, a construction worker, even ex-convicts or your own brother. Maybe hear the side of the guy who sells candy and cigarettes when the red light is on in Buendia, and see that there is as much to him as there is to the rich businessman he sells to, who sees his reflection in his gleaming car and his visions in and for this country, despite the difference between his windswept hair and tweed suit to that of the muddy feet and tatters for clothes standing a few feet from him. They are both humble workers, though one is accustomed to the blast of cold air-conditioning and the other to hot dusty winds thrown at him. From there, all around, there is the passion of a teacher who by its meagerness cannot possibly work for the salary but for a higher purpose, the OFW bearing months and even years from home to venture faraway lands in the yearning to find a better life for his children, or the simple humor of that fish vendor by the road to the market, and hear her tales, about how her husband died and her house was flooded and her furniture stolen, still set on a happy tone. There is the hope that no matter how invisible, a Pinoy resides within. Redundant his title may be as it resounds being just as much the hero that can be found in Jose Rizal, bestowed in blessing by the Almighty as a King to His knight.

What would be more Filipino than a Filipino?