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REVIEWS

 


A BOOK REVIEW AND INTERVIEW (OF DEFIANT DAUGHTERS DANCING: THREE INDEPENDENT WOMEN DANCE)

by Agnes Prieto

Last week, we interviewed Rina Angela P. Corpus, author of Defiant Daughters Dancing: Three Independent Women Dance. Agnes Prieto wrote a comprehensive review of two local books tackling dance, and we’re reprinting parts of that review:

 

Conscious Trance, Defiant Daughters Dancing and Other Rebellions (two book reviews)
Two books on dance –Defiant Daughters Dancing by Rina Angela Corpus and Conscious Trance, the Journey to the Dancer Within by Pi Villaraza are important voices from the realm of quarter life — that time which brings on the quest for meaning beyond the conventional routine of the accepted ; a midlife concern in the past.


Both authors are quarter lifers, but one is a trained ballerina steeped in the classical and active in the academe, and the other, a yuppie turned solitary, isolated from the world, in a Palawan island, suddenly finding his body dancing and healing.


These books are statements that go beyond the conventional definitions of dance not just as external movement conforming to expectations, impositions and structure, but Dance as a listening to what is within and giving this outer form. It becomes inner dialogue presented for perusal by an observer.

 

The book, “Defiant Daughters Dancing” by Rina Corpus questions conventions of modern dance and ballet, focusing her sights on women dancers who have toed the line beyond tutelage and performance to dare beyond the pretty and graceful, to confrontation and challenge. In doing so, Corpus takes a leap to give us a peep into the history of contemporary dance in the Philippines.

Defiant Daughter is bravely feminist, highlighting the dance practice of three contemporary “dance makers” – Myra Beltran, Kristin Jackson and Agnes Locsin—and Corpus who sees herself as a co-performer as she documents how they traipse beyond the bar of conventional and traditional dance to new personal spaces and unexpected expressions.


Corpus documents the dualities of mind vs. body, reason vs. emotion, thinking vs. feeling, culture vs. nature, masculine vs. feminine. Dance makers challenge the traditional patriarchal logic to come to a sense of self-empowered expression.


Myra Beltran the first dancer in focus was presenting a self-choreographed piece entitled “Becoming”; an austere minimalist number which documented movement from struggle and angst to freedom in discordant and conflicted movement. This captivated Corpus and lead her onto her journey of documentation of the emerging energies.


Beltran started out as a conventional dance student and her struggle to overcome the challenges of a brown skinned neophyte danseuse lead her to much questioning and angst which eventually shaped her own independent dance path when she returned home.


She took to heart the necessity for cultural grounding, exploring in depth issues of women in the Philippines, among other topics. Dancing would become Beltran’s mode of self-empowerment, transforming her personal angst into an expressive piece of art, a fresh language with which to communicate social concerns and community issues with her highly individualized movement expression, or dance.


She would evolve in empathy with other artists as she began to improvise free body movement for installation works of art icons such as Bencab, Robert Villanueva and Kidlat Tahimik, creating ritual around their expression. Her presence added dimension and movement to their collaboration.


Technically, Beltran uses the rudiments of ballet work –but with improvisations on basic ballet steps, to get in touch with the body and not so much to show off form. It is introspective bringing dance deeper in an understanding of her own bodily gestures and expression.


Kristin Jackson, another dance-maker in focus exemplifies the Filipina in diaspora having settled and created a dance career in the US. She makes her mark with a clear definition of style characterized by stillness and repetitive movement amidst the culturally diverse environment of New York City where she dances.


Her influence is clearly Asian, minimalist with compositions of bare and basic movements says Corpus, distilling her movements to “the core or the essence”, “paring down a story to a few key phrases or words”. The cleanliness of dance movement complements the simple, non linear approach used in her group choreography known as the “chance method” in contrast to the linear logic of most Western work.


“The challenge and struggle is to stay honest and express myself simply clearly . The risk of failure is always present, yet, like life, it is through adversity that knowledge is gained”, Jackson says.


Agnes Locsin is best described in the Ballet Philippines logo showing an Igorot priestess performing “balletic legwork of a la seconde attitude, her arms outstretched and hands flexed in a Cordilleran bird-mimicking attitude”. Locsin is best known for her neo-ethnic productions such as Igorota which impacted on the “independent dancing” scene as part of the “Philippine Movement Transformation “ in tandem with the Filipino search for a national identity. Her vast body of work is characterized by ethnic inspired dances many of them reflecting her roots in Mindanao.


Locsin’s dancing career had an early boost as she helped in her mother, Carmen’s dance studio right in the family living room.


Eventually she would teach and take on choreography, capping this with an MA in dance abroad . As artistic director of the Cultural Center of the Philippines for 15 years she would gift her audience with wondrous repertoire of such works as “Babaylan”, “La Revolucion Filipina”, “Igorot”, “Taong Talangka”, “Moriones” and “Salome”.


A Filipino dancer –that is her identity as she easily integrates the classical with the indigenous seamlessly. Her early grounding in dance and intensive research work on Philippine culture has ensured her place in the Philippine dance story.


History unfolds events , helping us understand the present, and who we have become because of what was. These two books evoke a delicate branch of our story, movements gone undocumented had not these voices been raised; ephemeral as they may seem, they are important nevertheless .


Villaraza is the rare Filipino who has articulated his spiritual journey, and its grounding in everyday life. Corpuz brings delicate shifts in dance to our attention; mirroring us, and gifting us with understanding and acceptance. These are must-reads, if we wish to understand and embrace ourselves as a people; and to relate to the quarter lifers in our midst.

 



FORCING THE PACE BY KEN FULLER

by Kenny Coyle
Morning Star, Tuesday 19 June 2012

With his second volume on Philippine communism now in print and the third on the way, this first part of Ken Fuller's trilogy is now available in electronic format.

Published by the University of the Philippines Press, Forcing The Pace covers the period of the foundation of the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP) in 1930, through the tumultuous decades from the 1930s to the 1950s.

In scarcely a dozen years the PKP had to navigate the rapids of repression by the colonial US authorities followed by a brief breathing space of legality before Japan invaded and occupied the islands.

The party's armed resistance movement the Hukbalahap became one of Asia's most important wartime liberation forces.

But its struggle for freedom was derailed.

The return of US imperialism after 1945 led to the country being dragged into a new round of bloodletting.

In consequence, the Philippines moved from open factional dominationto neocolonial dependence. Anti-communist repression drove the PKP into illegality and the Hukbalahap was forced into resuming their armed struggle.

But it took place in increasingly unfavourable conditions and its difficulties were compounded by serious errors made by the PKP itself.

Fuller's is a masterly account and essential reading for anyone with an interest in the period.

The Kindle format book is available for download at tinyurl.com/forcingthepaceebook.

[Note from Ken Fuller: when I clicked on this link it merely took me to the Morning Star homepage. Possibly it works only in the UK. In fact, the book is available in ePUB format anywhere in the world from flipreads.com, or in the Kindle format from amazon.co.uk (UK only) or amazon.com. The appropriate free reading devices for desktops can be downloaded at these sites.]




urian

PHILIPPINE CINEMA IN THE '90s, ACCORDING TO THE MANUNURI

by Patrick F. Campos

Urian anthology revealingly documents the decade of the ‘dying cinema’-what Nic Tiongson calls ‘the worst of times’

SOMETHING HAS definitely changed between the 1990s, when “indie” was meaningless to the popular imagination but meant hope for a dying cinema to a subculture, and 2010, when “indie” means “art films” that today outnumber mainstream movies in output and prestige.


It is easy to forget the ’90s, when Philippine cinema underwent “the worst of times.” It is a decade rendered nebulous for being sandwiched between the “Golden Age” of the ’70s and 1980s and the current indie cinema.


What is ironic is not only that the film industry had been declared terminally ill during the decade of the Centennials of the Birth of Cinema and of Philippine Nationalism, but also, precisely, that it is so easy to forget the films of this decade.


“The Urian Anthology 1990-1999” (University of the Philippines Press, 562 pages), a collection of articles, reviews and interviews by the Manunuri ng Pelikulang Pilipino (MPP), remedies that. Introduced and edited by Nicanor Tiongson, the book is the third in a series of richly illustrated coffeetable books. Taken together, these volumes are an indispensable compendium on cinema since the ’70s, accessible to scholars and general readers alike.


Film history


“The decade of the 1990s will be remembered perhaps with bittersweet memories because it was a decade of ironies and major contradictions,” begins the book’s introduction, which is Tiongson’s percipient study of the cinema of the decade.


He details these contradictions and, with well-documented data, the problems that beset the industry, rendering it practically dead by the end of the 20th century. He also underscores some of the circumstances and people who have kept the industry from expiring, or have paved the way for a new cinema. Tiongson’s historical analysis serves as a warning and a reminder for today’s filmmakers.


Beyond what its title suggests, the purview of the anthology includes the whole history of Philippine cinema. There is a new historical survey by Agustin Sotto. There are historical sketches in the profiles of film artists, like Charito Solis and Mike de Leon. And there are nuggets of history contained in the citations of the Natatanging Gawad Urian Lifetime Achievement awardees, such as Nida Blanca and Leopoldo Salcedo.


These are valuable materials, since a full history of Philippine cinema is yet to be written.


Various highlights


Depending on one’s “use” for the book, the anthology has various highlights. The volume includes analyses of the Gawad Urian Best Film nominees and winners, which name the decade’s best works, ranging from the likes of “Sana Maulit Muli” to “Bayaning 3rd World.”


It has a section of interviews that focuses on the aesthetics and milieu of the important directors of the ’90s, like Marilou Diaz-Abaya, Chito Roño and Raymond Red.


The anthology features studies using various critical approaches to aspects of Filipino cinema, including its influences, formal developments, and recurrent themes.


Another section compiles reviews of representative genre films (action, drama, horror), “which constituted more than 90 percent of the total industry output.” This figure is no longer true in today’s cinema; more “indie” films are now being produced than formulaic mainstream films. But the evaluation of movies, crass and cultured, may serve as pointers for today’s film producers.


An intelligent audience


What is important is not necessarily the individual viewpoints of the critics. One may, by all means, disagree with them. What is important, as Tiongson reminds us of the raison d’être of the MPP, is to “upgrade the quality of Filipino movies by writing reviews and articles which could give producers systematic feedback on their products and at the same time make audiences more critical of the films which, whether they realize it or not, have an impact on their lives.”


Today, we see not only the production of more intelligent films, but also the rise of more intelligent viewers who can praise or criticize films and give immediate feedback via the Internet.


The variety and sometimes contradicting viewpoints represented in the anthology serve as encouragement for the patrons of Philippine cinema. Viewers are to be critical when watching bakya movies, just as they are to be discerning and not passively congratulatory when watching “award-winning” films.


‘Filipinos’ and their ‘cinema’


The last section is an annotated list of all the films made in the ’90s. It provides valuable material for posterity, like a time capsule of narratives and images, in place of a national film archive that is yet to be established. It may also serve as a springboard for examining “Filipino Cinema,” not just for the sake of cinema, but of Filipinos.


What were the early films of today’s biggest stars, and what do they reveal about the culture that supported and eventually gave up on the movies? Why is the most productive genre of the ’90s, the bakbakan, now dead? What were our horror films about, before the rise of “Asian Horror”? What were the earlier works of today’s indie stalwarts like? Why was there a decline in quantity and quality in Philippine film after martial law, when democracy was supposedly restored by the Aquino government? These are just some questions for which the filmography and the anthology may provide leads.


“The Urian Anthology” is a contribution to the exiguous collection of books on Philippine cinema. But, more importantly, it gives us a clue to its national context. Philippine history is symptomatically and literally inscribed in old films—what the Philippines used to look like and what values the Filipinos prized. The Philippine nation finds microcosmic articulations in cinema.


Tiongson ends his study thus: “It does not take a genius to see how or why the decade of the 1990s could very well be called “the worst of times” in the history of the Filipino cinema because it was the decade when greed, attended by opportunism and compromise, reared its head and ruled in practically all levels and institutions of the movie industry.”


Could we not learn from this insight to move not only our cinema, but also our nation forward?

inquirer.net



urian

REDEMPTION OF A DECADE IN PHILIPPINE CINEMA

By Francis Joseph A. Cruz (The Philippine Star)

MANILA, Philippines - We are a sentimental people. We thrive in captured memories: photographs of ourselves backdropped by famous locations in lands we’ve visited, memorabilia from baptisms, weddings, and anniversaries, essential souvenirs from personally important events in our lives. We are constantly nagged by a fear that lest we have tangible representation of points of reminiscence, we tend to forget. And we do forget.


Our country’s history is haunted constantly by recurring themes of failures, followed by great victories, followed by forgetting, followed by failures, and so on. We establish monuments, statues, and shrines. We name schools, streets and bridges by events or people that would supposedly inspire us to remember.


We are a nation of forgetful people who constantly scrounge for objects to remember. That is our fault. That is also our virtue.


Perhaps the biggest representation of this irony is our cinema. We are proud of it, sure. We rejoice when a Filipino film wins awards overseas. Unfortunately, jubilation is fleeting, if not totally hypocritical. We only recognize our cinema when it receives foreign accolades. Without them and quite horrifically, with them sometimes, our cinema is treated like junk – both symbolically and literally – thrown in un-airconditioned basements and warehouses to burn or rot.


We remember the greats – the films of Brocka, Bernal, the two De Leons, and Conde – yet we are completely unaware that almost all of their films are inexistent in their original formats, most of their films are available in substandard digital copies, and some of their films are completely lost.


What we have left are descriptions, perhaps two or three paragraphs at most, to have us remember these films which we absolutely have no memories of.


Inasmuch as preserving films are important, the act of chronicling films, whether analytically or journalistically, is essential in recreating memories out of nothing, caused by the failure of a people that views cinema as a disposable thing of the present instead of a cultural stronghold.


It is for this reason that Dr. Nicanor Tiongson should be commended for coming up with The Urian Anthology 1990-1999 (UP Press 2010), a handsome yet heavyset tome containing memories – mostly good with sprinklings of some bad – of a contestable decade in Philippine cinema.


It is an elegant book. Its cover, a sepia-hued collage of several scenes from films, mostly historical and involving national heroes portrayed by different actors and actresses, seduces the onlooker to reminisce the decade when glamorous historical epics apologized for the numerous titillating showcases and brash comedies that populated movie houses.


The decade, described by Tiongson as the “best of times, the worst of times,” saw Philippine commercial cinema at its lowest, where studios literally and figuratively prostituted itself and its talents to battle imports. Yet the decade also showed glimmers of excellence, where filmmakers and even studios experimented and, in turn, paved the way for the seeds of what was to come the next decade.


A quick skim through the pages reflects the differing facets that defined the decade. Stills from the numerous films adorn the margins of the book, detailing the highs and lows of cinema, where the same actors played national heroes and rapists, the same actresses portrayed dignified women and prostitutes.


The reviews, selected by Tiongson from the Manunuri’s own roster of critics ranging from the enlightening like Hammy Sotto to the populists like Butch Francisco, are important because most of them reflect the critical reaction during the time of the film’s release, approximating, at least to the current reader, how a film was over-appraised or under-appraised.


The various articles, academically rationalizing the pleasant and unpleasant movements and genres that emerged out of the dire economic circumstance of the industry, are springboards for discourse.


The interviews of the decade’s defining filmmakers are also interesting, especially those of filmmakers who continue to work today who might have sacrificed some of the artistry they preach about to survive the dehumanizing rigors of present-day commercial filmmaking.


For whatever its worth, for however critics and filmmakers acknowledge it now, the decade that Tiongson’s indispensible labor of love gives focus to, as exemplified by the collection of articles that seeks not to blindly honor but only to document the decade that passed, is an amalgam of colors, themes, moralities, and levels of artistry that Philippine cinema is evolving into.


Little by little, as a subtle thread of a narrative develops as Tiongson’s carefully conceived book closes to a finish with filmographies of the decade, we acknowledge that Philippine cinema lives – through the good times and the bad.


Personalities pass. Directors retire. Studios fold. Cinema continues, constantly reinventing itself, constantly changing. The Urian Anthology 1990-1991 is the suitable memoir for this nation of forgetful filmgoers to remember that cinema is of value and should be valued.


I just hope that we do not become content with articles and pictures, and start watching these films, and if they are unavailable because of reasons beyond our control, start clamoring the government for a film archive to save us from the dangers of forgetting.


philstar.com




sanjuanthree

From Globalization to National Liberation: Essays of Three Decades

by Jeffrey Arellano Cabusao

Bryant University

            The selected essays, interviews, and lectures of the past three decades by E. San Juan, Jr., a major Filipino American public intellectual and 2009 fellow of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute, bear witness to a global shift from a politics of despair to a politics of hope. This collection provides a richly textured interdisciplinary approach to reading the shifts, transitions, and contradictions of global capitalism, specifically about how "the ideology of neoliberal transnationalist exchange has evolved, after 9/11, into the unilateral 'American Exceptionalist' discourse of the 'war on terrorism' and the more contentious 'clash of civilizations'" (xvi). In exploring the ideological transition from globalization to a US-led Global War on Terrorism (GWOT), San Juan recognizes new forms of national movements for self-determination developing as a powerful collective global force: "[T]he battlefronts of Palestine, Colombia, Mexico, Nepal, the Philippines, aside from those in the Middle East, are mounting a formidable united front from the grassroots to oppose the destructive maelstrom of globalizing corporate power" (xviii). This theme of transitioning from the dominance of finance capitalism (globalization) to the global reach of subaltern resistance rooted in national liberation, first explored in San Juan's earlier works such as The Philippine Temptation: Dialectics of Philippines-U.S. Literary Relations (1996) and After Postcolonialism (2000), is especially useful for reimagining Cultural Studies and American Studies as part of an international challenge to US racial imperialism.

            The collection's point of departure is a much-needed interrogation of the "post" that frames our current intellectual moment, whether it is the "end of theory," a "postnationalist" globalized world, or the "post-racial" US society of the Obama era. Part One engages theory, specifically the debates concerning frames of intelligibility offered by postcolonial theory. San Juan resuscitates the silenced subaltern by writing against the politics of despair present in postcoloniality. A careful reconsideration of primary sources within the field of Gramscian studies opens a space for San Juan to resituate the relationship between the subaltern and the critical intellectual within a larger context of international solidarity. Rethinking dominant theoretical frameworks enables intellectuals to hear current subaltern alternatives, from the Maoist overthrow of the centuries-old monarchy in Nepal to the reinvigorated national liberation struggles sweeping Latin American countries such as Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador.

            Part Two reclaims key concepts such as nationhood and class, which postcolonial theory and the neoliberal ideology of globalization have replaced with notions of cosmopolitanism and hybridity. Advancing Michael Löwy's Marxist approaches to the historical phenomenon of nationalism in Fatherland or Mother Earth? Essays on the National Question (1998), San Juan examines the global dispersal of Filipinos from a Southeast Asian archipelago still in the process of becoming self-determined after a century of US colonial and neocolonial control. A detailed cognitive mapping is provided to highlight the interconnectedness of Filipino experiences throughout the diaspora: the racial oppression in the United States of Filipinos (now considered "the largest Asian American ethnic group in the U.S." [ix]), the exploitation of overseas Filipino workers (approximately nine million, "mostly female domestic help" [89]), and the gross human rights violations of the eighty million people of the Philippines under the Arroyo administration (300). While earlier publications such as Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease's Cultures of United States Imperialism (1993) and Abe Ignacio et al.'s The Forbidden Book: The Philippine-American War in Political Cartoons (2004) have interrogated the violent erasure of the colonial conquest of the Philippines from our collective memory of US Empire, San Juan explores the unique unfolding of Philippine subaltern struggle within the realm of a "Filipino praxis of alter/native writing" (125-30). This decolonizing aesthetic can be discerned in the cultural production of Filipino artists Carlos Bulosan, Pete Lacaba, and Levy Balgos de la Cruz, among others.

            Part Three demonstrates the possibility of critical literacy in the age of empire informed by what Noam Chomsky sees as the responsibility of the intellectual to "insist upon truth . . . to see events in their historical perspective" (qtd. in San Juan 29). Pushing against the Cartesian dualism implicit in deconstructive approaches to reading, San Juan turns to Charles Sanders Peirce's semiotics to articulate an alternative framework for literary analysis. An exploration of Peirce's "thought in motion" (triad of sign, object, and interpretant) leads to innovative readings of the sign "terror" as deployed in the GWOT and representations of state terrorism in Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost (2000), a haunting novel of the Sri Lankan civil war. San Juan's meditation on Sri Lanka enables him to provide insight into the raging civil war in the Philippines. His close reading of the Philippine national sovereignty movement unravels the Colin Powell doctrine, which not only positioned the Philippines as the second front in the GWOT but also categorized Philippine subaltern resistance as "terrorist." Drawing on a global Marxist archive that spans the work of Lenin, Trotsky, Frantz Fanon, and Carol Pagaduan-Araullo, San Juan reveals how the GWOT uses the concept of terror to criminalize forms of dissent.

            If Cultural Studies and American Studies are to be relevant in these times marked by war and the collapse of global capital, these fields must develop approaches that address the centrality of race in the formation of the US nation-state (remembering its racialized genocidal foundation) and in its policies abroad. They must also engage the contributions of current national liberation struggles in the global south to our worldwide struggle for dignity and respect for all humanity and the entire planet. San Juan's collection illustrates how an enduring history of Philippine sub-altern movements for self-determination ("silenced" by both the GWOT and postcolonial theory) functions as the "Achilles heel" of US imperial hegemony in Southeast Asia as well as a source of critical renewal for Cultural Studies and American Studies. From Globalization to National Liberation reminds us that the responsibility of the intellectual is to cultivate solidarity—to hear new sounds, rhythms, and voices of transformation around the globe.

 

- from MELUS (35.1), pp. 193-195






gayculture

BOOK REVIEW PHILIPPINE GAY CULTURE: BINABAE TO BAKLA, SILAHIS TO MSM

by Nigel Collett



Nigel Collett reviews J. Neil C. Garcia’s 536-page Philippine Gay Culture, in which he examines a range of labels/identities that emerged since the 1960s to describe indigenous sexual and gender identities which have little modern (western) equivalents.


I am approaching this review with more than the usual trepidation, for several reasons, which I should enunciate. Firstly, Philippine Gay Culture has but been reprinted here as the book’s third edition, with a few amendments, a new ‘Author’s Note’ and, as its last section, ‘An Update and a Post Colonial Autocritique’. The first edition was widely acclaimed as ground breaking and authoritative when it came out in 1996 (it had a second edition published by the University of the Philippines Press in 2008 which included most of the current additions). It was a literary hit, winning author J. Neil C. Garcia the National Book Award from the Manila Critics Circle. The world of Queer Studies has acclaimed it; Peter Jackson, of the Australian National University, for example, typically calling it ‘a founding text of comparative gay and lesbian studies that has supported the emergence of Asian queer studies in this decade.’ No wonder, then, that Hong Kong University Press is proud to be able to include it as the third work in its exciting and rapidly burgeoning Queer Asia series.

The second reason for my conviction that I must approach this book with care is its complexity. It is a vast work of scholarship and argument, which, with its generous and detailed academic apparatus, reaches 536 pages in all, not something easily picked apart by a reviewer’s slight of hand in a thousand or so words. Then, for third, there is Garcia himself, a revered figure not only in the Philippine gay world but also in the literary, a poet, critic and writer who has a prominent place teaching creative writing and comparative literature at the University of the Philippines, Diliman. On top of this, he is one of the most pugnacious of writers, as a dip into any part of this book will prove, a writer of conviction and the power to express it, not a man, in short, with whom to trifle! And finally, and this is a confession on my part, the fourth reason for more than the usual circumspection here is that I am no student of, let alone expert in, the Philippine gay scene; I am in no position to compare and contrast, and, as most of the book’s new readers will, must be content to place myself in Garcia’s hands for the history and theory that he unfolds.


Trusting the author is, as is now clear to me having read this book, something more than usually necessary here, as the gay culture of the Philippines which he describes is unlike that of anywhere else, far removed, indeed, from those known to us in the West or in the more widely known Asian cultures, such as those of Singapore, Thailand or China. Garcia makes this plain in his choice of subtitle: ‘binabae’ is a word for those of the ancient indigenous population with a gender-crossing identity; ‘bakla’ is their modern equivalent, ‘homosexual’ men, some of them gender-crossers, others maybe merely effeminate transdressers; ‘silahis’ is the apparent heterosexual who has sex with other men, either as a genuine bisexual or as a closeted ‘homosexual’; and ‘MSM’, of course, is the modern, intendedly-neutral, HIV NGO-derived catch all acronym for any man having sex with another man. These are the terms that drive sexual dynamics in the Philippines and form its gay culture. Garcia shows that the western terms ‘homosexual’ then later ‘gay’ were attached here to the bakla, and that it is still their culture (which is not unlike, though only in some respects, the katoey culture of Thailand) which is meant when the word ‘gay’ is used. Note the absence of any application of the ‘gay’ word to the sort of non-effeminate homosexual men who, in the experience of societies which have been more widely commented on, form the large part of the gay community elsewhere. In the Philippines, the power of the macho closet is so strong that such men are very rare (so scarce that Garcia hardly bothers to consider them) and it is partly to this fact that he attributes the lack of much of a gay rights movement in his country. I should point out here that Garcia himself is an out and proud bakla; his disdain for silahis and the closeted in general is unavoidable in his text.

So, foreign perspectives don’t work when applied here, and Garcia’s exhaustive investigation into his country’s gay culture takes him down some unexpected paths. He traces the modern bakla back to the tribes inhabiting the archipelago before the arrival of the Spanish in the 16th Century. These conquerors suppressed, perverted and misrepresented the culture of the people they colonised and converted to Christianity. Back then, binabae, priests (local shamans) played key roles in their people’s spiritual lives, and these binabae could be female or male-to-female transgendered. Philippine culture conceived of the person as having an interior (loob) separate from, and with greater value than, their exterior (labas). So transgendered persons were accepted as those fulfilling their loob in their labas. Christian suppression of both native religious beliefs and sexual practices submerged this system, but enough of it remained to evolve into the local culture of the bakla, effeminate men (many of them transgendered) who dress as women, behave and often work as women, and who are 'used' by men as women. Whilst their modern typical occupations of hairdresser, window dresser, beautician, and the like, echo the katoey and similar manifestations, they differ in that the bakla are not prostitutes, and, in fact, if they find relationships with men, inevitably end up paying for the upkeep of their ‘spouses’. The men, of course, remain dominant and heterosexual (in their own eyes) in these relationships. When the western sexologists’ discourse of inversion (of homosexuals being women in men’s bodies) arrived in the Philippines, it elided into the local culture of loob, and similarly, later, the words ‘homosexual’ and ‘gay’ attached to the bakla.

In Part One, Garcia investigates these systems and looks at the indigenous pre-colonial culture still (partially) visible from colonial records, then, in the order of his chronological survey (which is not that of his book), jumps to the four decades from the Sixties to the Nineties, examining each in turn and using them to develop and illustrate his theme. Part Two of the book is very different, a study of three Philippine writers, Severino Montano, Orlando Nadres and Tony Perez, whose works Garcia examines in the light of his research and theories and whose sexual politics he criticises. He has chosen these three writers (for reasons not entirely clear in the text) to make what he describes as ‘the first […] project in local literary criticism with homosexual writings as the specific object of scrutiny.’

The Lion and the Faun, Montano’s huge unpublished novel (Garcia had seen only its first half of five hundred pages when he wrote this book) was written many years before and covers the 1950s and 1960s, something, perhaps, of a Philippine equivalent to EM Forster’s Maurice. Garcia dislikes this story of closeted gay (non bakla) love, with its misogynist and macho themes, and attacks it accordingly, taking the unusual stance, as he does in all his criticism in this book, that only a gay man can write a convincingly authentic gay novel, which has, therefore, to be a sort of roman a clef. With playwright Orlando Nadres, author of a frequently performed and very popular Tagalog play (in its English translation named That’s All for Now and Many Thanks), Garcia is back on the more favoured ground of the bakla, one of whom is much featured in the play. The third work examined here, Tony Perez’s novella Cubao 1980, a tale of two male prostitutes, is not, to Garcia’s way of looking at gay culture, about the gay world or its liberation at all (for many reasons, one being that it misses the ‘pain’ of the bakla’s condition entirely). It gets as short a shrift here as does The Lion and the Faun.

Part Two of Garcia’s book is eccentric, not, as the first section was a review of gay culture through history, a parallel review of Philippine gay literature over time, but rather a dissection of three works using the theoretical tools he develops in Part One of the book. This makes Philippine Gay Culture a train of two carriages hitched together by an interconnecting internal argument. Yet none of this detracts from the writing of the second part, where Garcia romps around on his home ground of literary criticism. His writing in Part Two is clearly the better of the two. Garcia does not fail to amuse here; he is lively, cheeky, cutting, bruising and never dull. His insights into the works he examines are the results, in part, of the test tube experiments he conducts into the literature using the tools of the theories he has developed in Part One.

Don’t read this book expecting an easy ride. Garcia is very persuasive (watch his arguments carefully before you get carried away by his conviction!) and has huge knowledge which he wields with much common sense. After a good deal of the required reflection, there is not much for a general reader to find to quarrel with in the conclusions which he reaches. The information and arguments deployed, however, to reach those conclusions, can be, at times, maddeningly convoluted, dense and repetitive, and the book would benefit from both reorganising and pruning. He has the grace to admit this himself in the ‘Author’s Note’: ‘I am no longer the clumsily prolix, overeager, wide-eyed and theory-crazed person who cobbled together these words’. That said, he left the book as it was in the second and third editions with ‘only a modicum of blue-pencilling and emendation.’

That he is unapologetically an advocate for bakla culture (kabaklaan) may or may not be a defect in the thrust of the book; I possess no alternative sources to reveal any special pleading. It would have been interesting, though, had the later editions followed through his arguments to examine more closely the evolution of gay culture in the Philippines from the '90s till today. There remains, I think, a need to prove or disprove the continuing centrality of kabaklaan to gay culture there. Has MSM started the process of the development of more westernised styles of a more equal male-male love? We are left unsure. Garcia cites the recent coming out in public of at least one prominent man of upper class, but this is not enough to evince a trend and it would be interesting to see if yet another post-colonial foreign imposition is now changing the way the Philippine gay world sees itself in the new millennium.

Should you buy this book? Most certainly. This is a thorough and deeply considered study of a unique culture which elucidates some very surprising (to foreigners) phenomena and comes to unusual conclusions which have both utility for an understanding of the Philippines and stand as convincing testimony that queer theory as an academic discourse must account for a myriad of queer theories if it is to describe the world we live in. More than this, Philippine Gay Culture is a brave polemic, a call to freedom, by a fine writer and a decent man. Buy it, stick with it, bite off small bits of it at a time if you have to, but read this book!


fridae.com


J. NEIL GARCIA'S PHILIPPINE GAY CULTURE: BINABAE TO BAKLA, SILAHIS TO MSM

by Dominique James


Gays in the Philippines are everywhere. They are easy to find. And while most Filipino gays are tolerated, they are often misunderstood. J. Neil Garcia's Philippine Gay Culture: Binabae to Bakla, Silahis to MSM, spanning a thirty-year study and analysis of gay culture as well as the author's experiences, is an intellectual exercise in grasping the cultural essence of Filipino gays.

This makes available, for the very first time, "a serious academic inquiry into the field of knowledge and mode of being which is Philipppine gay culture itself." It uncovers rich and diverse thematic Philippine gay narratives on the stereotypology of the funny gay, gay theatrical discourse, the church and homosexuality, swardspeak (gay lingo), and the sexual subculture, among many others.

"All three decades of gay culture, as far as the many themes and motifs which constitute them are concerned, may actually be taken as one"

This book originally outed, quite ceremoniously, in 1996. Its second coming, an updated edition which came out more than a decade after, upholds much of the original text, blue-penciling only the author's stylistic writing in few places. The only other significant change is a hefty new final chapter reinforcing the contentions of the original, making it more fresh and just as relevant as when it first came out.

J. Neil Garcia's Philippine Gay Culture: Binabae to Bakla, Silahis to MSM is a personal but scholarly work that is a must-read for anyone who aims to grasp the blooming gay culture in the Philippines from the '60s to the present.

San Francisco Book Review - October 2009




pook

Loob, Labas, at Lalim

Louise Vincent Amante

Ipinagmamalaki natin si Cory Aquino bilang “the Filipino Joan of Arc,” ang Eraserheads bilang “Beatles of the Philippines,” at ang Payao ng Banaue bilang “Eighth Wonder of the World.” Ngunit lagi’t laging naka-angkla ang ating kahusayan sa Kanluraning pananaw—para masabi lang na “mayroon ding ganyan sa Pilipinas.” Tila carbon copy tayo ng Kanluran.
 
Alam kasi natin na hindi tayo dapat magpahuli sa pag-abante ng Kanluran. Nang salakayin ng mga mananakop ang ating kukote, sinabi nilang wala tayong demokrasya’t relihiyon. Ipinakilala nila ang kanilang mga konsepto’t kaalaman hanggang mapuno ang ating mga utak. Kung ano ang mayroon sila, dapat ganoon din tayo.
 
Kinakailangang tumbalikin ang ganitong mentalidad para makaalpas sa pagkakolonyal ng ating kamalayan. Sa panahon ng aktibismo ng dekada ’70, umusbong sa UP ang sari-saring teoryang Pilipino na magagamit para suriin ang ating kultura, kamalayan, at kalinangan. Isa sa mga ito ang Pantayong Pananaw (PT) ni Dr. Zeus Salazar ng Departamento ng Kasaysayan. Simple, kung tutuusin, ang PT: aralin at suriin ang kasaysayan ng bansa gamit ang pananaw ng mga Pilipino. Gamitin din ang wikang Filipino para maipaunawa ang kasaysayan sa kapwa Pilipino.
 
Maganda sa umpisa ang PT. Bago ito ipinakilala ni Salazar, sa wikang Ingles itinuturo ang ating kasaysayan. Nang gamitin ng PT ang wikang Filipino, naging dulog ito sa pag-aaral ng kasaysayan sa mga akademya. Dahil dito, ayon sa PT, nabubuo’t napauunlad ang talastasang bayan para sa adhikaing pagka-Bansa. Ngunit mahigpit ang PT sa mga kaisipang galing sa labas, lalo na kung Kanluranin. Anito, makasisira sa talastasang bayan ang mga ideolohiyang ito, partikular ang Marxismo.
 
Kaya’t hinimay, tinistis, at sinuri ni Dr. Ramon “Bomen” Guillermo ng Araling Pilipino ng Kolehiyo ng Arte at Literatura ang PT sa kanyang aklat na Pook at Paninindigan. Aniya, kailangang punahin ang PT “hindi lamang mula sa labas, kundi sa pamamagitan ng paglabas” dito.
 
Pook
 
Mula sa kanyang tesis masteral noong 1999, inapdeyt ni Guillermo ang pagsusuri sa PT para mabuo ang kanyang aklat. Layon nitong tuligsain ang ideya ng PT na ang Marxismo o kaisipang sosyalista ay “banyagang ideolohiya” kaya hindi angkop na gamitin sa pagsuri ng lipunang Pilipino. Bukas ang PT sa alinmang usaping panloob o konseptong bayan: na tayong mga Pilipino lang ang makauunawa ng ating sarili at hindi maididikta ng anumang Kanluraning teorya ang ating pambansang identidad. Mula rito’y makikilala natin kung ano ang ating kultura’t pagkakakilanlan.
 
Batay sa pag-aaral ni Guillermo, dapat siyasating mabuti ang ganitong buod ng PT sapagkat tila ihinihiwalay nito ang Pilipinas sa daigdig. Nararapat ding maging bukas ang PT sa pagangkin ng mga kaisipang galing sa labas upang maging mabunga ang loob, o talastasang bayan. Hindi matatawaran ang alinmang banyagang impluwensya sa bansa lalo pa’t dating kolonya ito ng Espanya at ng Estados Unidos (US). Maging noong panahong kolonya pa ang Pilipinas, naggigirian na ang mga nakatataas at aping uri sa lipunan. Dahil simplistiko ang paghuhusga ng PT laban sa Marxismo, itinatakwil nito ang realidad na matindi ang agwat ng mga uri sa lipunang Pilipino.
 
Ayon sa PT, nahahati ang lipunang Pilipino sa elite at masa. Binansagan ito ng PT bilang “dambuhalang pagkakahating pang-kalinangan.” Nahubog ang mga elite sa banyagang wika at kultura at ang mga masa sa kinagisnan nitong taal na wika at kultura. Ngunit hindi sumasang-ayon si Guillermo dito. Aniya, “hindi umiinog sa diksurso ng uring panlipunan ang kritikal na perspektiba ng PT” at sa halip, ginagamit nito ang elite/masa bilang mga kategoryang kultural.
 
Ayon din kay Guillermo, hindi hinihiwalay ng Marxismo ang kultura sa pang-politika’t pang-ekonomikong kalagayan ng isang bansa. Hinamon ni Guillermo ang simplistikong pag-unawa ng PT sa uri, kultura, at lipunan sa paghahain ng ilang mga tanong: dahil itinaguyod noon ni Marcos ang wika’t kulturang Pilipino, masa ba siya kung maituturing? Kung susuriin ang mga teksbuk pangkasaysayan ng mga Zaide, bakit panig ang kanilang akda sa US gayong nakasulat ito sa wikang Filipino? Sapagkat walang maisagot dito ang teoryang isinulong ni Salazar, tila hindi pa ganap ang pagkakasinsin nito bilang kritikal na teoryang Pilipino.
 
Paninindigan
 
Hindi maitatangging banyaga ang Marxismo bilang ideolohiya. Pero ayon kay Guillermo, maingat ang pag-angkin o “pag-andukha” sa Marxismo upang magamit sa talastasang pampolitika sa Pilipinas. Patuloy na napauunlad ang Marxismo dahil dumaan ito sa maraming talastasan, kung kaya’t lalong tumingkad ang pagkaakma nito sa pagsusuring pampolitika’t panlipunan ng bansa. Ayon kay Guillermo, nagkaugat na ang kaisipang sosyalista sa lipunang Pilipino at patunay dito ang mga nobela nina Lope K. Santos, Lazaro Francisco, Amado V. Hernandez at iba pa. Mababasa sa mga nobelang ito ang pagkakahati ng lipunan sa mga anakpawis at mga namumuhunan. Mapapanday pagkatapos ang talastasang sosyalista sa mga unyon ng mga anakpawis na may sosyalistang perspektiba para sa kapakanan ng mga manggagawdt magbubukid ng Pilipinas.
 
Sa bahaging ito ng pag-aaral ni Guillermo, ipinakita niyang may taglay na ideolohiya ang alinmang akdang pampantikan. Igiit man ng ilang manunulat na hiwalay ang sining sa politika, ang hindi paglalatag ng politika sa mga akda’y politika ring maituturing. Sa panig ng PT, itinatakwil nito ang Marxismo pero wala itong binabanggit o kahit puna man lang sa mga isyu ng kahirapan, katiwalian, o human rights violation sa bansa. Ayon kay Guillermo, “ang ‘pagpapahalaga sa sarili (Bansa)’ ang lumilitaw na pangunahing usapin (ng PT) na hindi na nangangailangan ng ‘pakikibaka laban kaninuman.’”
 
Mahusay ang kritikang ito ni Guillermo sa muling pagsipat at pagtistis sa PT. Sa ilang banddy tila hindi na makababangon ang PT sa mga puna ni Guillermo. Ngunit hindi niya inusisa ang PT dahil sa poot o suklam. Ang ilang posibleng tanong rito’y baka naman isa lamang akademikong dulog ang PT at hindi mailalabas sa pamantasan. Iminumungkahi ng aklat na makilahok ang PT sa bayan upang maganap nang lubos ang layunin nitong makabuo ng talastasang bayan, at makiisa sa pakikibaka ng masa para sa panlipunang katarungan.

Source: Philippine Collegian, September 11, 2009


startle

No Enlightenment Here; Just Keenness

by Mads Bajarias


Maybe I’m just getting old, but I find myself getting drawn more to poetry as a remedy to the crass displays of emotion that pop culture inflicts on us.

Sure, pop culture is a lot of fun (isn’t “Glee” wonderful?).

But pop culture is so pervasive; it is this machinery of focus groups, consumer trends, celebrity intrigues, product endorsements, beauty enhancements, sob stories, and other “infotainment news.”

Joel Toledo hopes to offer his readers a “keener attention” to the craft of poetry in this latest volume, he said in an interview with Mads Bajarias.

The purveyors of noontime shows, television dramas, and showbiz programs have carpet-bombed us with slick, fast-paced, hilarious, well-lit attractive celebrities that act as our models of good consumer behavior.

However, there is something of pop culture’s wall-to-wall merriment and freewheeling consumerism that leaves one drained as well.

Sometimes, one yearns to escape from all the “high-definition” reality “shows,” all the manufactured “togetherness” and forced “awesomeness.”

All that public airing of grief, gaiety, and doubt can become cloying, and the “medium is the message” knowingness can be very exhausting.

I don’t have a garden, so my tonic for the oppressive omnipresence of pop culture is poetry.

I’ve recently come across the latest book of poet Joel M. Toledo.

Published by UP Press, “The Long Lost Startle” is a collection of 60 poems from the literature professor from Miriam College.

Written between 2006 and 2008, “The Long Lost Startle” is his second book of poetry.

I’m not going to lie; I don’t understand some of the poems here.

I even tried my best to comprehend Dr. Gemino Abad’s introduction, but I guess I don’t have enough brain cells (this must be what watching “TMZ” has done to me!).

But I appreciate Dr. Abad’s situation; writing intros to poetry books must be like trying to dress a shadow.

Poetry is complicated enough, why make their introductions even more so? Maybe it’s a tradition?

Perhaps it’s the mystery of poetry that draws me towards it (“There is no enlightenment here; just keenness”).

In Toledo’s work, one finds this humility in awe of those everyday mysteries that most of us – our senses dulled by “Wowowee” and its ilk –have somehow forgotten.

These things moving in wind,
we have names for them: feather, dust,
bird. That which, now and then, urges leaves
to nudge the movable branches. Sometimes,

we may even see their quiet collisions,
flecks of sudden and minute life
as this afternoon, sitting on the porch
and watching my wife dusting off blankets,

the sunlight gathering around her lithe body,
our children running under the swayed trees
and the startled birds, the dust swirling joyously
everywhere, celebrating their release. And I am held

in awe of the things that move in the world,
or are moved, and of the privacy of the living,
all the many rising objects revealed only by refraction,
and why I just sit here, straining.

(from “Dusting”)


I should read Dr. Abad’s intro again (after I finish watching tonight’s “Man Vs Wild,” of course).

I love how things attach themselves
to other things – the rocks sitting stubbornly
beneath a river, the beards of moss.

I choose a color and it connotes sadness.
But how long must the symbols remain true? Blue
is blue, not lonely. After a time, one gives up

reading the sky for shadows, even rain.
There is no promise, only a possibility.
A moment moves to another, and still it feels

the same. Like old letters in boxes.
Or how the rain, at times, falls invisibly.
Finally, the things we love demand more love,

as if we have always been capable of it. Yet
I can only offer belief, mirages that mean water,
long travels leading somewhere. I am reading

old letters, trying to make something
of what’s been said. It might be raining;
some pages are unreadable.

(from “Attachments”)

Again, I don’t understand all of it.

But I like uncovering tenuous connections that might lead to a sort of enlightenment.

If I want everything crystal-clear, I’d watch Fareed Zakaria or read Malcolm Gladwell. But if I want mystique, I head out to nature or read poetry.

the fireflies are satisfied with their nature,
their flickering envy of stars.
The same is true of the bullfrog,

announcing its presence by the pond,
and of the waiting owl, wide-eyed
and dark-winged and silent in the tree.

(from “Atonement”)


I don’t pretend to get all poetry, nor can I explain why some poems grab one’s attention and others don’t.

Summers we would climb trees, collecting the carcasses of cicadas.
Those were bright days, small suns flickering madly inside
the abandoned shells. And how could we have resisted them?
We were far from the city and its hard surfaces; we had so much time.

(from “Softness”)


One of these days, I’ll have to start tending to a garden. Or suit up on one of those marathons.

In the meantime, there’s poetry to explore on days when the machinery of pop culture gets a bit too much to bear.

I can do with less electricity,
preferring, say, more of the quiet
and strange commotions that take place
outside, somewhere in the bushes,
within those terrifying enclosures
that make us rise in the middle
of an evening and step out,
carrying nothing but our tired bodies.
There will be the gentle creaking,
slow feet on wood, and the great wanting
to climb some tree, confront its dark
branches, negotiate with the leaves.
Like wide awake and blind,
I would see the veins that complicate
all the living: my body, this tree,
the now visible embers glowing with power,
the natural heart that never sleeps.

(from “Pulse”)

I was able to reach the author and managed to fire off a few (okay, two) questions.

Me: What do you wish the reader will take away with him after reading “The Long Lost Startle”?

Toledo: I hope readers will notice that this book is much different than my first one (“Chiaroscuro”) because of its keener attention to craft. There are a lot of experimentations going on with language here, and how language intertwines with musicality in a poem – from assonances to enjambments to half-rhymes. I’m more inclined now toward taking risks with syntax and diction to achieve a more lyrical set of poems, and by “lyrical” I mean more musicality. I hope the readers will be able to distinguish the interplay of risk, language, and music in this new book.

Me: Where can people get a copy?

Toledo: UP Press, National Bookstore, Powerbooks, mag:net cafe Katipunan.

Me: Can you explain to me Dr. Abad’s introduction? I’m just kidding.

And some words of praise by Eric Gamalinda for “The Long Lost Startle”:

There is generosity and wisdom in these poems, a sense of wonder that elevates the most ordinary of things and bestows upon them a special place in the world.

Informed by both intelligence and compassion, Joel M. Toledo’s “The Long Lost Startle,” I believe, will be considered a major work in Philippine poetry; while the angel of history sees the future by turning his back on the wreckage of the world, Toledo fixes his gaze with attention and astonishment, and in the process heralds a future with some of the most memorable poems our country has ever produced.

I find that’s so much nicer to read than tweets about Kanye West.

Source

   
bilanggo

Bilanggo


Ken Fuller



07/21/2009


Only one of the 12 authors whose books will be launched by UP Press at Diliman’s Balay Kalinaw this evening ever, as far as I know, served a prison term. This was, of course, the late William Pomeroy, whose Bilanggo: Life as a Political Prisoner in the Philippines, 1952-1962 tells the story of his incarceration.

Although American, Pomeroy, along with his wife Celia Mariano, joined the Huk Rebellion in 1950. Bilanggo was written immediately after, and in the same style as, The Forest (an account of his two years with the Huks) and was, indeed, viewed as its sequel. But Pomeroy did not agree to its publication for over 40 years, as it contained details of political differences between himself and Jose Lava which, he felt, were too important to omit, too controversial to publish.

To avoid a death sentence, Bill and Celia had pleaded guilty to charges of rebellion. This was at a time when the Huk movement, constituted on the basis of the wartime Hukbalahap, first as a defense against the attacks of the Roxas government forces, then as a mistaken bid for state power from 1948 onwards, was "in decline and suffering defeat." They fully expected to be in prison for at least 10 years, a prediction that proved remarkably accurate. Former Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas general secretary Jose Lava and others, arrested in the "Politburo raid" of October 1950, had a different view.

Pomeroy recalls that "our comrades in the Politburo group had been arrested when our movement was at its high point and looked to victory in the relatively near future, and their stand of ‘not guilty’… was linked with a belief that an ascendant revolutionary movement would soon release them. Incommunicado as they have been, cut off from events in the field, they still hold fast to this belief."

When, therefore, upon his arrival, Pomeroy was instructed by Lava to provide a report on conditions outside, he was told "not to convey these matters in any way to anyone else in the group unless with permission." Relations between the two men — and Celia, who was held separately — remained fraught with difficulty throughout the prison years and far into the future.

Pomeroy’s first prison home was Muntinlupa, where despite a regime of ostensible solitary confinement, the political prisoners used ingenious methods to communicate. Assigned to compile a study document on the nature of imperialism, Pomeroy wrote it on the back of cigarette packets. In this fashion, there was devised a course on Marxist principles, an adult education course for those who had missed out on school, and a course encouraging cultural activity.

The political prisoners did in prison what they had previously done outside. They organized — a Leading Organ (LO), a security and intelligence committee, an organizational section, a finance committee and an educational section.

All of this was achieved despite extreme restrictions which remained longer than they might have, because the Lava-led LO took the view that "to request or demand privileges or concessions may be interpreted as weakness, as inability to take it, as softening up under pressure." Pomeroy and others suggested organizing friends and families to publicize their case and petition for their release. "But the LO says, No."

There were about 20 in the "Politburo group," while an initial 120 (largely rank and file communists and Huk soldiers, although this group contained a few leaders) were kept separately in a "Rebellion group." This latter group grew to 250 or more, the newcomers bringing news of further setbacks and defeats. The LO insisted that such news be kept from the rank and file. While Bill and Celia argued that the truth should be confronted, "a report is circulated that all news of setbacks, of surrenderees, of the movement being decimated are enemy propaganda, and false. Our movement is growing stronger. We will be free within two years."

Quite apart from the politics, there is much of interest in Bilanggo — the resoundingly unsuccessful efforts to "turn" Pomeroy and his comrades, an account of grisly gang warfare that leaves the political prisoners untouched ("They are the comrades of all of us!" one gang leader instructs his followers), and the occasional glimpse of the historical figure — Magsaysay, Edward Lansdale, Carlos P. Garcia.

And, as readers of The Forest would expect, there are moments of reflection. As he is conveyed to the NBI office, Pomeroy watches the people on the street. "Often we in our movement had addressed people such as these, saying, ‘You are not free. Your country’s independence is false, it is in the control of foreign masters. You are unfree in the hands of corrupt tyrannical politicians, restricted by mercenary police, in bondage to bosses, debt slaves of landlords and moneylenders.’"

But now he thinks that "it is difficult to convince people to rebel against such abstract denials of freedom when they can move unhindered in a street, get on and off a bus at will, walk into homes, shops and marketplaces without prevention. Tyrannies, I conclude, endure not only through what they deny but through what they allow."

When a woman called Luming weakens and goes over to the military, Pomeroy asks himself: "Could the Luming defection have been averted? Should a tough line of discipline be taken toward everyone who exhibits weaknesses or resentments in prison? Can there not be a degree of tolerance toward people under pressures in confinement?" Of course, such tolerance might also be of value outside prison, whether in a fractious movement, or a society so prone to individualism.

The prison experience can destroy character, but it can also consolidate it, which is presumably why Bill once told me that he did not consider these years wasted.

Available at good bookstores, Bilanggo may also be ordered direct from the UP Press Web site: http://uppress.com.ph.

Source


Arkitekturang Filipino

Is there ‘Filipino architecture?’


By Augusto Villalon

Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 06:44:00 08/10/2009

Filed Under: Architecture, Books, history


A MOST welcome addition to the scant material on Philippine architecture is “Arkitekturang Filipino: A History of Architecture and Urbanism in the Philippines,” by Gerard Lico, professor of Architecture and campus architect of the University of the Philippines.

The book is from the collection published by the University of the Philippines Press in celebration of the university’s centennial.

The title of this book, eminent architecture historian Rodrigo D. Perez III writes in the foreword, “may resurrect an old question: Is there such a thing as Filipino architecture?”

For generations the issue keeps arising during academic and architectural discussions, stubbornly refusing to be put to rest.

But Perez resolves the issue, completing his introductory statement: “Anyone who has diligently examined the various types of buildings in this country and has bothered to look into their history will realize that there is such a thing as Filipino architecture.”

The 560-page textbook takes an in-depth examination of Philippine architecture as it has been shaped over the centuries by environmental, historic, cultural and political influences.

Illustrating how architecture is often used as an instrument of domination in some periods of injustice, Lico correctly points out that, despite being subjected to colonial, political or financial demands, the genius of Filipino architects, whether schooled or not, has always shone through.

Lico takes architecture in its holistic context. Buildings are not studied as solitary monuments. Instead, the author steps back and refers to the built environment as part of an urban or landscape ensemble, integrating architecture with human life, which is the way it should be, since architecture, no matter how grand or humble, is simply the nurturer of lifestyle.

Lico does not isolate architecture. He looks at it through a trained historian’s eye while acknowledging the strong contribution of allied disciplines such as sociology, culture, history, politics, economics and others in shaping our towns and the structures that give those towns their character.

Geography as influence

Geography is another strong influence in our lifestyle, and Filipino architecture reflects the influences from across the seas, starting with the Austronesian building tradition that came to the Batanes islands from southern Taiwan over 6,000 years ago, before dispersing to the west through the Philippines to Borneo, Sulawesi, Indonesia and ultimately Oceania. Eastward, the Austronesian influence spread to Vietnam, the Malay Peninsula, reaching as far as Madagascar.

Among some shared Austronesian characteristics very evident today are language similarities and houses raised on stilts with steep, thatched roofs.

There is no denying colonial influence. Philippine architecture reflected what Lico terms the “spectacle of power” so evident in the Spanish colonial churches, government buildings, and especially in the rigid town planning following the precepts of the 1573 Leyes de Indias, which stipulated exactly how new towns were to be laid out.

Thanks to the royal ordinance signed by King Phillip II of Spain, towns were laid out in a rectilinear pattern, with straight streets crossing each other at right angles, around a central plaza where the two main structures were the principal government building and the church facing each other. The highest government and church officials lived in the town plaza along with the elite.

Upon the introduction of “imperial imaginings” by the newly installed American colonial government in 1898, Lico dissects its impact on the architecture and urban design in the new tropical colony of the United States.

This is the age of Daniel Burnham and his City Beautiful urban plan for Manila and Baguio in the image of Washington, DC.
Outside the Intramuros walls, Manila broke out in wide, radial boulevards shaded with tropical hardwood. Neoclassic government buildings, such as the Manila Post Office and the Philippine General Hospital, were situated at strategic locations as focal points declaring the new style of colonial governance.

Pre-World War II Peace Time was the apex of American power in the Philippines, the halcyon days of Quezon when the Philippines reflected its opening to world influences with the Art Deco architecture and lifestyle of the 1930s.

From the ashes of World War II, Lico traces the permanent destruction of Intramuros and the rise of Quezon City, suburbia and bungalow housing.

This was the time when architectural leaders emerged: Juan Nakpil, Pablo Antonio, Carlos Arguelles, Leandro Locsin, whose presence led to the establishment of a strong architectural profession.

Vernacular renaissance

Lico takes a perceptive look into the renaissance of Filipino vernacular architecture, followed by examination of various architectural trends until arriving at the current phenomenon of an “architecture of pluralism” that embraces the architecture of malls, new developments like Global City in Fort Bonifacio, Rockwell Center and Eastwood City Cyberpark.

The question with the present state of architecture in the Philippines is: Is the current trend signaling the end of Filipino architecture?

“One way or another, as in the past, the Filipino will prevail,” Perez so positively declares.

Hopefully this book will inculcate in the student who reads it a strong sense of pride for the culture that has produced the individualistic Philippine architecture.

More importantly, this volume provides an opportunity for students to discover and appreciate the intellectual foundation of the architectural profession, preparing them to be thinking architects rather than simply being back-room architectural technicians servicing the export market.

“Arkitekturang Filipino” is available at University of the Philippines Press, E. de los Santos St., UP Campus, Diliman, QC; tel. 9253243; fax 9282558; e-mail press@up.edu.ph.

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