I don’t apologize that it is only now that I am beginning to identify as a Filipino. I used to think that all that was Filipino in me was pure happenstance—I happened to be born in Manila of parents both Filipinos, who might have raised me in America if they had the chance. And yes, they did.
MOVING TO AMERICA
My siblings and I spent much of our formative years waiting to move to California and, in my late teens, it was going to happen. We had our passports stamped with immigrant visas, our suitcases were packed, we had disposed of many of our things, I was going to throw me a goodbye party with all my college friends, and then my father died, no warning, and so did his Great American Dream for his family.
But it would not be as easy to de-Americanize someone like me who grew up in a milieu where all things American were good things, from Sesame Street to The Love Boat and Charlie’s Angels and then to The Simpsons and The Equalizer, from JD Salinger to Mario Puzo, later Stephen King, from Marlon Brando to Jimmy Dean, not to mention Camp John Hay in Baguio and the American ice cream there, not to mention the American milk in a glass full of ice—and, lest I forget, whether as a destination or simply imagination, New York! New York!
But New York, even before I made it there, was all the world in one place at once and, in hindsight, I am glad that it was—and not any other American city—the setting of my American dreams because it brought me to Paris, to London, to Morocco, to Berlin and Brussels and Budapest, to the rest of the world, even to Moscow back when the word Russians had an evil, World War III ring to it.
WHO WE ARE IN THE WORLD
Fast forward to now, and I am no longer young and the Great American Dream is decades behind me. I’ve been to Europe more times than I’ve been to the US and, truth be told, if I must choose, I’d take Algiers or Antwerp over any American city I can think of right now, except Alaska, but only if the object is a little adventure.
Not that it’s strange, but I’m more Filipino now than I have ever been.
I cannot speak for Filipinos out there in the world, the Overseas Filipino Workers, for instance, or the migrant Filipinos who have adopted new citizenships and maybe even new identities, but like many of us in the Philippines right now, I bemoan the lack and limitations associated with being Filipino, the lack of infrastructure that makes life seem so much easier in cities like Tokyo or Seoul, the lack of preserved architecture that makes Florence or Prague or Istanbul so postcard-pretty, their centuries-old charms just lying on the streets like everyday things, even the lack of parks like the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont that, even outside the city limits of Paris, is worthy of a visit.
At the same time, however, I feel ever so much more curious about my own place in the world, about what makes it different that I am a Filipino, about who I am on earth, my past, my present, my future, as a citizen both of the Philippines and the world.
THE SPECTRE OF COMPARISON
Little did I know that all these years I had been on the trail of what our national hero Jose Rizal called el demonio de las comparaciones, a phrase he used to illustrate the condition in which Crisostomo Ibarra, the protagonist in his controversial, incendiary 1887 novel Noli Me Tangere, found himself, upon returning to his land of birth, unable “to look at the Botanical Garden of Manila” without remembering the gardens of Europe.
This was the theme of the Philippine Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2017. Curated by Joselina Cruz and featuring the works of Filipino transnational artists Lani Maestro and Manuel Ocampo, our artistic representation, on display at the Artiglierie at the Venetian Arsenal, the main exhibition space of the Venice Biennale, was anchored on Rizal’s demonio, which was appropriated (and translated into English) over a century later, in 1998, by Irish-American Orientalist, historian, and political scientist Benedict Anderson as a title and subject to his book The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World.
My awakening, if indeed this is what I am going through, has been a long process I can only attribute to age or to my recent close encounters, such as with National Artists for Literature Virgilio Almario and F. Sionil Jose—the latter having asked me directly over lunch, “Do you read Filipino?” to which, unprepared, I only managed to say, “I was crazy about Rizal!”—or to recent experiences, including my unequivocal, often-challenged support of the early years of the presidency of Rodrigo Duterte who, in what was construed as his ungracious, undiplomatic, uncouth manner, made me personally rethink our relations, both historic and current, with the world at large, the US specifically, as well as my travels, the Singapore Writers Festival in 2014, and, more than anything, the Venice Biennale almost every year since 2015, when the Philippines returned to this international art exposition after a hiatus of 51 years.
READING ‘RIZAL READING PIGAFETTA’ IN ROME
It’s true, though it’s very presumptuous of me to liken my appreciation of the Philippine Pavilion 2017 theme, “The Spectre of Comparison,” in Venice to Rizal at the British Museum in London in 1888 discovering Antonio Pigafetta, Italian scholar, explorer, and diarist of Ferdinand Magellan’s 1521 voyage that led them to circumnavigate the world and “discover” the Philippines. Chancing upon Pigafetta’s account of the Philippine discovery in the original Italian version, according to Resil B. Mojares, professor emeritus at the University of San Carlos in Cebu City, Rizal immediately and enthusiastically wrote his friend Marcelo del Pilar, “I have here Italian manuscripts that deal with the first coming of the Spaniards in the Philippines. They are written by a companion of Magellan.”
In his article “Rizal Reading Pigafetta,” which appeared in the literature that accompanies the 2017 Philippine Pavilion at Arsenale, Mojares continued: “Lamenting that he did not have the time to translate the text ‘on account of my numerous chores,’ urged del Pilar to get one of the Filipinos in Madrid to study Italian (which he said, with his customary zest for languages, could be learned in one month) and translate the discovery account to Tagalog or Spanish ‘so that it may be known how we were in 1520.’”
Every time I would be in Europe—I read Mojares’s enlightening article in Rome, where I went on holiday after my Biennale visit in 2017—the ghost of Pigafetta would make its presence felt.
ON THE INDOLENCE OF THE FILIPINOS
In 2015, I met the late venerable London-based Filipino international artist David Medalla at Stazione di Venezia Santa Lucia, the main train station in Venice, and no sooner than we, along with his constant companion, Australian artist Adam Nankervis, had shaken hands than he whisked my group off to Vicenza, just short of an hour away by train from Venice, to pay tribute to a statue of the Vicenza-born Pigafetta. I have since twice read Rizal’s “On the Indolence of the Filipinos,” first published in five installments in La Solidaridad in Madrid in 1890, not counting the one time I read it, without much appreciation, in college.
In it, Rizal wrote: “The first thing noticed by Pigafetta, who came with Magellan in 1521, on arriving at the first island of the Philippines, Samar, was the courtesy and kindness of the inhabitants and their commerce. ‘To honor our captain,’ he says, ‘they conducted him to their boats where they had their merchandise, which consisted of cloves, cinnamon, pepper, nutmegs, mace, gold, and other things; and they made us understand by gestures that such articles were to be found in the islands to which we were going.’”
Given the timing, Rizal’s discovery of Pigafetta in 1888 and the publication of this essay in 1890, “On the Indolence of the Filipinos” was mainly prompted by Pigafetta’s account of the Spanish arrival, although the essay also sourced much from other ancient writings like Antonio de Morga’s 17th-century Sucesos de Las Islas Filipinas and Zhao Rugua’s 13th-century Zhua Fan Zhi, roughly translated as “Records of Foreign People” or unjustly (by the West) as “A Description of Barbarians.”
If I could only be a professor in my country, I would stimulate these Philippine studies which are like the nosce te ipsdum (know thyself) that gives the true concept of one’s self and drives nations to do great things. —Jose Rizal, letter to Ferdinand Blumentritt, 1887
I found it “a very extraordinary thing,” as Rizal did and said so in his essay that “in that very year 1521 when (the Spaniards) first came to the islands, there were already natives of Luzon who understood Castilian.” Further he wrote, “In the treaties of peace that the survivors of Magellan’s expedition made with the chief of Paragua… they communicated with one another through a Moro who had been captured in the island of the King of Luzon and who understood some Spanish. Where did this extemporaneous interpreter learn Castilian? In the Moluccas? In Malacca, with the Portuguese? Spaniards did not reach Luzon until 1571.”
We knew something of the Spaniards before they even came to “discover” us!
TIE A STRING AROUND THE WORLD
I grew up on a diet of Hollywood fantasy, in which every foreigner, particularly blond and blue-eyed and “American” (even if they were Irish or Australian), was superior and, shallow as it sounds, I didn’t know how wrong I was until, on my first trip to Los Angeles, I dragged a friend to the most happening mall, judged physical looks among the mallgoers with a scorecard in my head, which immediately I shared with my friend, and ended up with the final results of “two is to ten, more or less,” meaning there was only one exceptional-looking person or two at the most for every group of 10 people, and that was neither better nor worse a score, nothing different, than the score a happening mall in Manila or any other place that’s happening in my own country might get from me on any given day.
In 2015, at our Venice Biennale comeback, I put on hold my judgment of the Philippine Pavilion, that year curated by Dr. Patrick Flores, which featured the 1950 movie Genghis Khan by the late National Artist for Film Manuel Conde, a documentary by Manny Montelibano, and an installation by Jose Tence Ruiz, until I saw the rest of the exhibitions, particularly among the national pavilions in Giardini. Our pavilion at that time was set up at the ancient building Palazzo Mora in the Canareggio, the very heart of touristic Venice, but some way, 10 stops on the wrong vaporetto line, off the heart of the Venice Biennale, so it took me a while to appreciate what we had done.
But I was glad I took my time, as having judged most of the First World pavilions as too global—the Swiss Pavilion’s pool of all the chemicals, Viagra included, that had made modern life better or worse or different; the French Pavilion’s kinetic trees; the Nordic Pavilion’s shattered windows at the end of the world—and ours as being global and, at once, inextricably rooted to our very own unique experience as a people and as a culture, I felt prouder as a Filipino.
A QUEST FOR NATIONHOOD
Maybe the others have the privilege to look beyond country and countrymen in expressing their most noble dreams or their most terrible nightmares about our world now. If so, I am glad that our nationhood, in the Art Biennale, whether in 2015 or in 2017 or in 2019, is at the core of our presentation as a country. After all, as a truly free nation and an independent republic, we have yet to mature, what with 333 years of Spanish rule, during most of which we were not even Filipinos, but “indolent indios,” followed immediately by nearly 50 years of American occupation, a string of American puppet governments, Martial Law, and many post-EDSA Revolution administrations that didn’t do much to restore our national identity, let alone our national pride.
In its scope, the 2015 presentation broke through territorial barriers, but in the 2017 Philippine Pavilion at the Artiglierie in Arsenale in Venice, Italy, is more transnational, beyond borders, as it took off from Rizal’s realization that it is only on the ground of comparison that our search for our very own place in the world might yield some satisfying results.
From the Venice Biennale in 2017, I took the Thalys to Rome and then moved on to The Netherlands, exploring the cities of Amsterdam, Utrecht, The Hague, and Delft, as well as Antwerp in nearby Belgium, just as in 2015, from Venice, I wandered freely and found myself past, present, and future in Prague, Budapest, and Paris.
I took in the sights, enjoyed my trips, but I would feel a little ache where my heart was every time I stooped down to the ground in Amsterdam to take a photograph of a honeysuckle, every time I took a drink of a flowing fountain in Rome, every time I looked up at the buildings that have withstood the centuries, every time I heard “Por Una Cabeza” being played by a violinist for a few euros on the street, and every time I sat down with a Filipino friend for a meal typical of the European country we were in, who would miss home yet speak of the freedoms they enjoyed away from it.
Everywhere I was in Europe, I had Rizal’s demonio de las comparaciones for company.