A quick reaction piece to a post that I consider to be misguided in method, but accurate in principle. I realize he nor the principals who have been reblogging will likely read my response, but I hope that at least in this small space it gives another angle to evaluate our history by.
“We cannot reclaim Pinoy pride solely through boxing matches or a catalogue of personalities, but to distance ourselves from slavery. African-Americans rejoiced with Joe Louis, but continued to be defined by the Aunt Jemima’s and Uncle Ben’s of their stereotype. Heck, it cannot be reclaimed by a blog post. It takes a movement to correct the errors of education: to emphasize that we had sophisticated culture and governance before our colonizers subjugated and destroyed it with method. It takes a movement to render race illegitimate, that it is the shallowest and most inane facet of human difference. It takes a movement to reclaim our pride: that we are Filipino, that we are recovering from our addiction to Colony and driven out of place of our own country.”—
Confessions of a 21st Century Indio « The Marocharim Experiment (via thegreatest) (via helgaholic) (via presidents) (via pinoytumblr)
Pretty words for an old and hackneyed concept: de-colonization. I’ll let Nick Joaquin say something before I take over again:
The attitude, to repeat, springs from a static view of culture, which, in turn, breeds the illusion that history can be rejected at will, as we would reject our Creole history as not Philippine and not affecting the Filipino. The Filipino is thus seen, like the Asian, as a ‘timeless’ type defined by certain persistent qualities; and this Filipino, throughout history, never becomes but always is, which would make us a rather godlike being…
Rejected or not, recognized or not, the 16th and 17th centuries remain the epoch, meaning turning point, in our history because then was started the process of the making of the Filipino…
- Nick Joaquin
While I agree with Marochims ideas, in part, that we do need to reclaim our history. His methodology is at fault.
Slaves? Slavery? And so forth. Those are echoes of a Propagandist. A man who was attempting to awaken a slumbering nation. Our history has too often been utilized for propagandic means, resulting in a limited understanding of its true complexities. A conceit well-exemplified by this post. Rizal et al twisted history to ignite passions and fires. That is not wrong, but what it has created is a twisted view of history today. Instead of us delving into the actualities in pop history, we have continued to take their views as fact. Erroneously.
He comes from a well-founded perspective, but focuses on out-moded ideas of “oppression”. If we were oppressed so much as a people, how then did language and ethnic delineations survive? He casts the Philippines as a monolithic society, when in truth our regional differences have survived. Cultures, social idioms, regional peculiarities are still extant. If we were, as he says, completely and totally suppressed and oppressed, then one language should dominate the landscape, things like regional dialects and languages, pre-Hispanic idioms and rituals should not exist. But they do. Were our regional cultural differences lumped together and oppressed? If that were truly the case, there would be no differences among us.
The thing that no one ever ever ever wants to face up to is that there was active participation on the part of the Filipinos (not in its entirety) in the acculturation and Catholization of the country. Our focus should not be willfully destroying our history, but broadening the understanding of it, and drawing strength from that.
“Subjugated/Oppressed/Destroyed” are loaded terms, but what then is there basis in fact? Our history is much more nuanced than just that. “Imposed” and so forth, the Spanish are evil, etc etc.
Another fear stalks educated Filipinos when reflecting on their own culture: the fear of illegitimacy. Educate Filipinos themselves characterize their own culture as ‘mongrel,’ ‘bastard,’ sometimes as ‘half-breed,’ for Western influence permeates many areas of Christian Filipino culture whether in the countryside or in the city…
Zialcita, “We Are All Mestizos”
Marochim cites Rizal, yet Rizal was a mongrel; a mix, a Sangley. Since that is the case, isn’t his claim of “Indios Bravos” a misnomer? What he calls for is the whitewashing out of our history, the redacting of hundreds of years of what made us who we are. Instead of coming to terms with it, he wants us to ignore it. To focus on “pre-colonial” Philippines. This is an echo of the Marxist, “nationalist” histories of the 60s and 70s. Something that cannot be. What sophisticated culture should be focus on? That of the Tagalogs? That of the Cebuanos? Should we play up the internecine warfare that characterized the pre-Hispanic era? Or possibly things like human sacrifice? I don’t think he means this, but I use the examples to overtly point out the fallacy of broad generalizations. Regionalism is important, and it can be a source of strength when properly utilized. Especially in terms of education and teaching in mother tongues. But it has to be used to strengthen ties to the national whole. That is a delicate balancing act.
Marochim makes the error of confusing race with culture. They are not inextricably linked, and excising “race” from history and culture is not the same as excising history and culture from race.
This critique is ignored in the Philippines, where ‘race’ (lahi) and culture are often confused with each other, thanks to a long discredited anthropological discourse inherited from nineteenth-century Europe. Authors routinely speak of the ‘Filipino race’ or “Rizal, the pride of the Malay race.’ From the point of view of physical anthropology, there is no Filipino race, nor Malay race, nor, for that matter, a German or Japanese or Chinese race. But there is a Filipino or German or Japanese culture.
- Zialcita
The Philippines as a pre-Hispanic halcyonic paradise is a farce, a legend, concocted by the “nationalists” and Propagandists to decolonize us. It won’t work. You cannot excise integral parts of who you are in a vain attempt to re-claim something that was not there.
I’ve written extensively about syncretism and synthesis, the fact that there are vestiges of pre-Hispanic culture surviving today. I’ve taken aim at the false nationalists of the 60s and 70s, men like Constantino and Agoncillo. Men who supported, indirectly, the colonial mentality. I agree that we must remove race from our history. But it is not removing race in the manner that this writer puts it. Our race has little bearing on our culture and our history. To confuse the two is in error. We are not our race or physical features, we are our culture and our history. As terrible as it is, that is who we are. And culture is never truly harmonious. To expect that is to expect an impossibility.
I think my bone of contention is that he wants to decolonize. It is impossible. It cannot be done. And the process of decolonization is the process of breaking apart the Philippines. To remove who we are as a people today. Maybe that is his ultimate objective. But I look at it from a different perspective. We are a seething cauldron of influences: native, Chinese, Japanese, American, Spanish, Indonesian. What is truly Filipino? What does it mean to be Filipino? It is not found in 1520 nor is it found in 1872, nor in 1947 or 1986. It is a process of cultural formation that integrates our tribal past with our Spanish and American realities to our ‘Filipino’ present.
He makes the well-regarded point that we must look at both the benefits and negatives of colonization. Where I diverge from him is in the idea that we need to fling ourselves back to the territory of 1520.
There is the fallacy of basing who we are as based on the color of our skin. Of that I have no contention with; maybe in the presentation and the linking of it to our history, but not necessarily in the contention. The funny thing is, and this is a personal remark, is that I am a Filipino, have been since birth. Yet, I am often told I am not a Filipino because I do not have brown skin, or I am too tall, or my nose is too aquiline. I’ve experienced it frequently. That I am an ethnic mix and cognizant of it make me less a Filipino? Does the fact that I am a mestizo invalidate my being a Filipino? If Zialcita is to be believed, well we are all mestizos. Nothing can change that fact. But remaining focused on the superficiality removes us from the sublime complexity and inherent beauty of our culture and history.
Culture is history and history is culture. The preponderance of the years make us who we are. We cannot extricate ourselves from one aspect of our history any more than I can hold myself apart from my parents and grandparents and say they have no part in the formation of who I am.
Yes, it does take a movement to recognize who we are as a people. But it is not a movement founded in reverse racism or redacting of our history. It is not a movement founded on the untenable proposition that the pre-Hispanic archipelago was Camelot. There was no Maharlika.
The movement should be shunning race based delineations. The movement should be understanding the true nature of our history, not the lies we tell ourselves to make it easier to ‘face’ our colonial past. Those lies do nothing more than twist our view of ourselves. We hate our past, yet embrace and live in a culture formed by it. There are items of strength and beauty in our past; the fact that we subjugated Catholicism even more than it did us. That we retained identity and language and regional customs and mores. That we developed a Filipino consciousness in the 19th century that integrated all of the disparate elements of our past into an imagined identity of Filipinas. That we took that concept and used it to fight two international powers to a veritable stand still. That we rejected much of the American attempts to dislodge parts of our culture and remained Filipino (even as we accepted and integrated new artifacts inherited from them).
In principle I agree with Marochim. In methodology we diverge. What remains a fact though is that our understanding of who we are as a people must be re-evaluated. Our current education is doing more to break us apart as a people, as it does to bind us together. Differences can be a source of strength.
