Orientalisms

I’ve been reading a book of Pico Iyer’s travel essays on Asia and was quite boggled when, towards the end of his article on the Philippines, he compared the Filipinos to tennis stars. I cannot remember the exact reasoning that justified such a profoundly convoluted metaphor–I think it’s something to do with beautiful, empty-headed freaks who swung rackets and flashed short skirts in a spectacular display of glitzy showmanship.

Tennis stars indeed, I thought. A politically correct if extremely far-fetched way of saying that Filipinos are airheads?

Most foreign commentators tend to overestimate the supposedly infamous Filipino sense of humor. I remember Anthony Spaeth who covered Edsa II for TIME Magazine and who wrote in his article that Philippine democracy is nothing but ‘mob rule’. Filipinos were understandably indignant and offended. “Mob rule,” was the usual fulmination. “Mob rule! Stupid barbaric Westerners. Mob rule! The Mafiosi, the Marxists, the Moonies… we’ll show them mob rule!” And then everyone went on to poke fun at Spaeth’s bleeding Western heart ad nauseam.

In fairness to Anthony Spaeth, I think he wasn’t being really judgmental, but merely at a complete loss. How do you describe the spectacle of a former Solicitor General–with several senators and congressmen clapping behind him–standing on stage in front of nearly a million people on the crucial night before the military defection from the Estrada administration, and he was leading the crowd in a heart-breaking rendition of “The Impossible Dream”. I remember standing in the crowd, waving aloft my glow-in-the-dark stick, and thinking: “What the hell? Aw, screw it… No matter how hopeless!!! No matter how faaaaaaaaar!!! (Frank Chavez: “I’m not hearing you, kabayan! Come on, from the top!”)” And on the other side of Ortigas Avenue, another rally had gathered and everyone was singing “ERAP RESIGN!” to the tune of “Y! M! C! A!” and dancing, which is to say, bringing it on.

Mob rule, indeed. It was all probably beyond imaginging. Though Filipinos themselves have invented some pretty screwed lexicons about those First World Imperialists as well. The funniest, I think, in a macabre and tragic sort of way, has something to do with baths. Taking baths is, in the Philippines, a recognized national superstition, on par with not crossing an unfamiliar patch of land without saying “excuse me, tabi tabi po” to duendes and fairies and underworld elementals living there. Mind you, it’s not like a cultural extension of a religious ritual, as in the case of the Japanese (who are just anal, really). It’s just something you have to do.

For some reason, most Filipinos have got it into their heads that people who live in the mysterious West do not take baths. Or at least are horribly untidy. This is not a prejudice, but another superstition. I had thought when I was in high school that my family and their scrupulous fetish for scrubbing everything that moved (and later even those that didn’t, such is the apotheosis of closed-circuit socialization and genetic will-to-power) must have warped my brain more than I thought. I began to suspect everyone I met of being closet Sanitation Checkpoints, including the banana vendor who would wipe her wares before putting them on the scale after which she would wipe them again and look at me suspiciously as if to ask: Have you changed your underwear today?

Later on, I realized it wasn’t so much a personal neurosis as an integrated cultural pathology. My god, I thought, when a professor of history, who was otherwise in the middle of a serious discussion on Roman aqueducts, began to quote fantastic statistics about how People On The Other Side Of The Ocean on average took baths once every two weeks. And the entire class, otherwise serious about the architecture of aqueducts, murmured, horrified: “Ayyyyy” as if to say: “This, my friends, is what the Visigoths had done.”

To illustrate: While I was working as a researcher for another professor of mine, I would often listen in when he and several of his colleagues, all of them with doctorates from abroad, talk about their experiences. Of course there was the usual “Oh did you meet _____?” “I was so poor I had to do _____” “I wrote my dissertation on ___” etc. But mostly, they would talk about how and where they took baths. One of them recounted a lurid story about being stuck in Paris in the middle of an exceptionally freezing winter and being unable to find any sort of hot water whatsoever, so she had to settle for showering under a blast of -10 degrees Celsius water. I rather thought that experience would be similar to being pelted with ice cubes but the rest of the group were duly awe-struck at her ingenuity.

Not to say, though, that they didn’t realize that freezing your ass off was definitely not preferable to even taking a mini-mini-shower come what may, or that not everyone lived in a climate where you stink after crossing the street. But it was the principle of the thing, mind over matter, really.

And then there’s my mother who had confessed to me once in all seriousness that she would give Jesus a bath, if she could, since he looked so scruffy in his ‘pictures.’ She was being taken to the OR prior to a major operation and she was already heavily sedated and nearly unconscious. Then she groaned and opened her eyes a bit and peered at me and whispered, “Oh my god, Tin. I have not brushed my teeth.”

“Mother,” I said. “Please don’t do that.”

“Go get my toothbrush.”

“They’re going to cut you open now. Brush your teeth later.”

My mother glared at me balefully and demanded, “What’s so funny?” before she blacked out.

What’s so funny is that, during the height of the Bush administration’s Iraq war-mongering, I remember coming upon a group of people watching TV outdoors and it so happened that Bush was on. It was an excerpted news feed of his State of the Union Address that year. Everyone looked interested and fascinated. For a moment, I thought they would say something about the then upcoming Iraq war and what they thought of the US and all that. I prepared to listen in because neighborhood discussions were so much more interesting than those televised political debates. And then one of the men said: “Look at Bush. Look how neat he is.”

“He looks so mabango,” exclaimed another of the onlookers.

“And so clean!”

“Oo nga. I bet his aides really scrub him.”

I do not believe that we joined the Iraq offensive because we believed in democracy and freedom and all that crap. I bet President Gloria Arroyo thought Bush was mabango, too.

… I think at some point in this post I was supposed to review Pico Iyer’s book. Mamaya.

August 5, 2007 | Filed Under Books, Magazines | 2 Comments

Ctrl+P Releases its 7th Issue

Considering the controls and shifts that impact our lives, I invited contributors, artists, authors and curators, to speak about straddling places/teetering on the edge /being caught in-between; from rural to urban; rooted one moment, uprooted the next; between torment and pleasure; between in/out. To be in control is to be in charge or have the ability or authority to manage or direct things. Shift literally speaks of a move, a change in position, direction, and composition or circumstances.

The 7th Issue Ctrl+P Journal of Contemporary Art is now available for download (http://www.ctrlp-artjournal.org/pdfs/CtrlP_Issue7.pdf). Contributions to Ctrl+Shift are Alice and Rosy in Wanderland by Estelle Cohenny Vallier; To Alif, Gopali and Riham, Another Visa. Pleasure is Reduced to This by Mona Bur; Travels through 1001 Nights Cast by Barbara Campbell; A Chronicle of My Last Twelve Years by Karla Sachse; In time and Space by HERS Group; Out of Time by Adania Shibli; Unfinished Business by Jerome Ming; Causality (re)Cycles: A Community-based Recycling Program at Smokey Moutain, Metro Manila by Marlyne Sahakian; Options On by Lilian Zumkemi.

Ctrl+P is published on zero-budget and all their contributes write gratis. If you’re interested in learning more about them or joining their mailing list, email them at ctrp ctrl_p_artjournal @yahoo.com.

August 2, 2007 | Filed Under Magazines | Leave a Comment

Twittering; Maybe Sparrow

We have a Twitter account at http://twitter.com/readordie/. Follow us and we follow you!

And while we’re on the subjects of tweets (or tweetery things), Issue 1 of Maybe Sparrow is out.

Maybe Sparrow is a (very) small literary monthly which issues themed book reviews per issue. By ‘themed’ we mean something more topical (verging on pedantic) than the usual mixed TOCs of literary magazines. So let’s say for a particular month, the theme is–going by Issue #1–metafiction, or books about books. The editor will post a list of suggested books. Volunteer reviewers for that issue may also suggest their own and then pick as they will.

While Maybe Sparrow is hosted by Read or Die, it’s open to everyone, not just Filipinos. Issue 2 will focus on the works of British fantasy writer Diana Wynne Jones. Here’s the reading list and here’s the submission guidelines. Also, while it would be infinitely preferable if you would buy, borrow or mooch copies of the books in the reading list, we can file-share e-text copies for reference purposes.

June 17, 2007 | Filed Under Latest, Magazines | Leave a Comment

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