Blumentritt’s Legacy

Ferdinand Blumentritt (1853-1913) Photo: Lucien Spittael/Munting Nayon

Blogger’s Note: This article was first published in both the online and print editions of the Manila Standard Today newspaper, September 29, 2011 edition.

I first visited Prague in the late autumn of 2004 when the whole city seemed bathed in gold—from the last leaves of the season to the famous Charles Bridge with its load of visitors, the honey-tinted sunset lingered from the spires of the Gothic St. Vitus down to the narrow medieval streets that reminded me of the maze and blind alleys described in the novels of Kafka and Milan Kundera.

But aside from Kafka or Kundera, Prague for me also has a Philippine connection through Ferdinand Blumentritt (born in Prague in 1853), one of the ardent supporters of Jose Rizal, German translator of Noli Me Tangere and a prolific contributor to La Solidaridad, the Barcelona-published newspaper of the Filipino organization of the same name that propagandised for reform and assimilation of the Philippines as a Spanish province.

This chain of connections from Prague to Blumentritt to La Solidaridad has brought to mind another association, that of the Solidaridad bookstore owned by the multi-awarded novelist and essayist F. Sionil Jose.  This is not a haphazard link to me since I spent many blissful hours at the Solidaridad bookshop, one of the few if not the only respectable and true bookstore in Manila when I was a novice news reporter in the early 1980s. 

It was only at the Solidaridad bookshop that I convinced myself to part with my hard-earned pesos for a book that I could not find elsewhere in Manila. This was before Internet shopping and when mail orders for books printed overseas in those days would cost an arm and a leg. I even dreamed that if I win a million pesos in the lottery I would be content to run a Solidaridad-styled bookstore for the rest of my life, imaging the pleasures of reading while earning one’s income.

Back to Blumentritt whose legacy in Philippine history, already known to many, was his unrelenting defence of Philippine interests. Solidaridad or solidarity itself implies bonding and mutual trust, truly remarkable in the case of Blumentritt who had never set foot on Philippine soil, and yet has written expansively about the Philippines.

The last few weeks anyone who has read the major Philippine dailies or surf the social media will know the fallout from F. Sionil Jose’s two articles which confronted the reader with his description of the contemporary Filipino as being “shallow” or “mababaw.” Though one can take this unfortunate statement as a polemic perhaps aimed to prompt self-criticism, the intention has not only misfired but has been read as a whining, disparaging remark. 

Curiously, by spitting out this accusing tag it has squarely placed Mr. Jose in the same dubious corner that former First Lady Imelda Marcos found herself decades ago. Jose’s claim provides validation to the Warholian worldview reflected in Marcos’s assessment of the Filipino poor, and to quote: “Filipinos want beauty. I have to look beautiful so that the poor Filipinos will have a star to look at from their slums.” 

Marcos’s political strategy, however, was refuted years later in the words of assassinated former Sen. Benigno Aquino, whose “The Filipino is worth dying for…” inspired a peaceful revolution—six words that echoed beyond Aquino’s own life, and which exposed a barefaced lie foisted by the political elite.

Two views on the Filipino, one a disparaging and cynical dismissal, the other a hopeful and yet uncompromising opinion that overlooked the faults hounding a race, culture and a nation still grappling with the challenges and pitfalls of modern democracy. To be shallow suggests lack of empathy, already exposed as fiction by the lives of thousands of migrant Filipino workers toiling for their families abroad.

Clearly our perspectives are colored by our origins, class, education, status and belief systems—forces that elevate our person to that high horse from where we will utter an approving, or at the other end, a damning judgment. I wouldn’t want to be in Mr. Jose or Mrs. Marcos’ place, realizing, among other reasons, that being shallow is a trait that all men share or can fall into, regardless of culture, race, education or monthly income.   

More importantly, it is best to nurture Aquino’s optimism, precisely because it is this optimism that informs the spirit not to despair. From that lack of frustration we can move and continue plodding on to the next bend and uphill climb. 

Blumentritt was on the right track. He has never set foot on our land and yet he stubbornly nurtured the belief that we as a people will pull through regardless of our petty faults and spectacular failures. His, I believe, is a legacy that could yet last and find confirmation beyond our own lifetime.

 

The jeepney stops in Venice

The jeepney, the 'King of the Road' in the Philippines

Blogger’s note:  This article was first published in the opinion pages, August 27 edition of the daily Manila Standard Today.

In 2003, the Brisbane-based artist duo Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan presented at the Venice Biennale’s Zone of Urgency programme the Pinoy jeepney for a limited pasada, a quick stop in one of Europe’s prominent art events. I missed the event by a few months, and regretted having scheduled my visit at the wrong time.

Photos of the Aquilizans’ “In God We Trust” jeepney in Venice show this vehicle in all its chrome-silver splendor, not unlike the splashy versions we find on Manila’s streets or in a neighbor’s garage who nurtures a love for Sarao’s custom-made variants. But the Aquilizans’ jeep is not the kind of art that was totally appropriated such as the urinal in Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, where only the artist’s famed name or signature endows the object its formal status of art. In the Aquilizans’ art, strategy the signature is absent. What is conspicuously captured or embraced is the Pinoy’s love for embellishment and bling.

The Aquilizans equipped their jeepney with a load of Philippine souvenirs and did the same in succeeding exhibits in Australia where aside from the exaggerated shine of the original, the duo freighted the two-ton jeepney with chrome objects such as shovels and steamers. Their work speaks more of intervention where the jeepney’s exterior wrappings are cleverly peeled to show its social and historical layers, and where the viewer gets more than the trashy edge of a typical ragged and hard-working jeepney racing down Manila’s congested streets.

In Amsterdam, I was also surprised with an unexpected reunion some years ago with the jeepney at the Tropenmuseum, an institutional museum of anthropology, where the jeepney is displayed not as art, but as an unadorned object to illustrate the decay of urban centers and their impact on city dwellers. It looked like a carcass of metal with a dingy interior, with an air of being out of place and lost in the Tropemuseum’s cathedral-like space.

While the Aquilizan’s jeepney in Venice was brash and brazen with a polished and shining chrome skin, the Amsterdam specimen is like a whale out of water, beached in some alien shore whose passengers are nowhere to be found in the rainy chill of Dutch autumn. While the jeepney in Venice was regarded as art, the one in Amsterdam was pure object, divested of art’s clever and inspiring interventions.

In Venice, the jeepney was re-created and re-imagined to reflect the Pinoy humor and joie de vivre, the exultant spirit that triggered the jeepney’s creation during the post-War years. In Amsterdam, the original was simply transported, complete with a tattered cardboard “Baclaran-Pasay Taft-Quiapo” signage. Never had I seen a jeepney as bare and tired-looking as the one in Amsterdam, reminding me that facts, when confronted with little context can be depressingly banal than creative fiction.

I could imagine the pleasant surprise of Filipinos who might have unexpectedly encountered the Aquilizan jeepney in the Venice and Brisbane exhibits, reunited with this four-wheeled tarnished King of the Road often scorned by car-owners for its arrogant swagger and notorious propensity to hog the road and choke cities with tar-filled fumes.

But it is the Aquilizans’ singular achievement that a Philippine icon associated with the Philippine hoi polloi proudly represented Philippine art in an international event. The jeepney is often dubbed as “bakya” by the Philippine bourgeois, a mode of transport for the masses who are packed like sardines in the jeepney’s claustrophobic space.

The past weeks the Philippine press was saddled with a raging debate over another art work. Mideo Cruz’s Poleteismo has the same art strategy as the Aquilizans’ and Duchamp’s appropriative approach, common in conceptual art and a standard avant-gardist’s tactic to uproot objects from their usual contexts.

Marcel Duchamp's readymade art 'The Fountain,' Photo by the Beat Museum

In furious Facebooks posts I even encountered pseudo-clever opinions that Cruz simply transported a barong-barong wall stuck with news clipping and Jesus Christ posters and used the CCP’s walls as context to his risqué and recycled art. Like the Aquilizans’ Venice jeepney, I have only seen Cruz’s installation from photos. But looking beyond the penile accoutrements, the hostile and dismissive reactions have a bourgeois sneer to it, a hasty indictment that does not examine the work’s lineage.

I wouldn’t go into the inadequacies that the avant-garde art movement is saddled with in terms of art’s emphatic capacities —that would require another column. Let me just note, that beyond art various guises and effects, it would be helpful to remember that we look at art not because its expensive, famous, great or scandalous, but because it has the power to celebrate, to inspire and to hold a mirror before our noses.

Art does unlock memories (good and bad) nudging us to take a second look, freeze us in our tracks to look closely at the ground we are stepping on. In that sense we don’t need a hysterical Senate or a furious Church to tell us where and how to look. We ourselves are required by art to use our own eyes critically for there could be big gaping holes ahead where we might just fall into.

Loving the tinikling

Tinikling, a popular Filipino folkoric dance that requires stamina and agility,

Last year I launched and completed a daily blog project called “365 GPS,” GPS being an acronym for “Great Pinoy Stuff.” Of course the word “great” is subjective but what I basically did is to make a modest, random list of experiences, places, objects and other sundry elements from Pinoy life.

My only criteria was not to list the famous or celebrities to stay clear off “hero-worship” or the cult of personalities. And most of what I listed I myself have experienced first-hand and was convinced of their place in Pinoy life, however tangential that place may seem to be. The list included the most mundane in Philippine life from the beloved jeepney, halo-halo to “sundot-kulangot,” the latter which endlessly intrigued the curiosity of some of my Dutch friends. 

The blog was a hit. I was amazed by the response, which came fast or at least two weeks after the launch in January 1, 2010. Both Filipinos and non-Filipinos posted their enthusiastic comments, observations, tips and even asked where to buy a souvenir or how to visit a mountain resort. By March the visitor’s hits and page views were averaging to 600 a day, a figure which surpassed another and older blog I still maintain.

I was particularly interested on the responses from Filipinos who were born outside the Philippines and grew up as expatriates, but with a heart ready to immerse in the old country culture of their parents. One young woman in the US was enthusiastic in her gratitude as she finally found some more additional clues as to why her mother would laboriously cooked  champorado for her breakfast. She didn’t know it was actually Spanish in origin. An Austrian military historian wrote back about an entry on the war waged in Leyte Gulf and thanked me for the evocative description, while an Indian herbalist inquired about our own pito-pito concoction.

What started for me as a whim to relive in words the pleasures of eating “halo-halo,” or see the sunrise in Bohol’s Chocolate Hills, found resonance in someone living in downtown Chicago or in the suburbs of Mumbai. My entry on tinikling elicited a heartfelt response from a former folkloric dancer now living in Germany. Her response, which I did not make public in the blog, was rife with poignancy and a yearning for home. I learned more about the pitfalls of migration in a few lines form her than from a well-researched socio-cultural treatise on the Filipino diaspora.

Screenshot of my blog 365 Great Pinoy Stuff, also on WordPress

The blog ended at exactly midnight of December 31, 2010, and I breathed a sigh of relief when I posted the last entry, after I realised I underestimated the work behind the daily updates. But I was proud to have done it on my own with very little delays, and doubly rewarded with the insights and honesty of complete strangers.

The blog also reminded me of the artifice that separates so-called “high” and “low” culture, an artifice often built on prejudice, privilege and power structures. I know nothing or very little about the blog readers who posted their comments, not even their educational background. Based on their use of language, the responses could have come from high school students, professionals, graduate students, potential tourists, artists – a wide and motley set of readers.

But what gathered our individual voices into a small digital space was our interest and enthusiasm for experiences and places to be found exclusively or genuinely experienced in a cluster of islands called the Philippines. In that digital space the agenda was not one’s titles, academic degrees, achievements or place on society but the simple pleasures provided by the mundane, the taken-for-granted and sometimes the misunderstood.

Not to forget, the most read entry in the blog’s overall statistics was—you’ve guessed it–  the halo-halo. What can be a more fitting item to reflect an eclectic culture?

Halo-halo, the hugely popular ice-based Pinoy dessert, is a yummy concoction of fruit, beans, candied preserves, cream and other delicious tidbits

 

LINK to 365 Great Pinoy Stuff:  http://365greatpinoystuff.wordpress.com/