Philippine Colonial History in Postcolonial Translation:
Doing Judo on National Remembering
By S. Lily Mendoza, Ph.D.
Originally presented at the Annual Conference of the Association
for Asian American Studies (AAAS) held in in Washington, D.C.
from April 11–14, 2012
Abstract
Long before the successful importation of postcolonial theory to the Philippine academy in the mid-1990s, Nick Joaquin, renowned Filipino writer in English and multi-awarded national artist, proposed a provocative thesis that might well capture the quintessential postcolonial sentiment: What if colonialism were to be reframed merely as an acquisition of tools (e.g., new language, new technologies, new social and political organization, new religion, etc.) and that all such tools, in the words of McLuhan are “media of communication”? “Thus,” he argues, “could we solve the problem that most irks us about this epoch: the presence of the alien intruder, who would then be reduced, not without honor, to the role of medium” (Joaquin, 1988, p. 5). This study aims to critically engage this thesis and tease out its implications for Filipino and Filipino American resistance and indigenization struggles in the face of global challenges and imperial collapse.
Introduction
Part of what has fascinated me over the years is the way peoples who have undergone protracted colonization have sought to find ways to undo the effects of epistemic violence. Indigenization is one such project. Epistemic violence, in postcolonial scholar Gayatri Spivak’s view (1988), refers to the mechanisms by which colonial power seeks to constitute its subjects as Others, thereby disallowing them from assuming their necessary role as selves. It does this by denying natives the coherence and wholeness of their world mainly by casting their culture and reality as “barbaric,” “backward,” “uncivilized,” “lacking rationality,” and therefore undesirable. The effect is self-alienation, the inability to be beings in and for themselves. The experience is catastrophic—every bit as terrifying on the psychic level as bodily dismemberment is on the physical level. In the words of Fanon (1963):
Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys. (p. 210)
With their past thus destroyed and their present rendered unliveable with any sort of integrity, the question then becomes, what ground is there for the recovery of wholeness and healing from the psychic violence of colonial oppression?
Now this kind of language that I just used in these preliminary remarks sounds almost archaic, because for a lot of us educated postcolonial elites, the name of the game is artful performance of hybridity—something Filipinos are especially known for, maybe even thriving in the heart of empire, with a number of us even becoming so skilled as to beat the master at his (gendering intended) own game. So you may ask, what colonial angst is she talking about that needs “healing” and “wholeness”? But indulge me for a moment.
In their work, Dion-Buffalo and Mohawk (in Esteva & Prakash, 1998) offer three possible options for colonized subjects, i.e.:
. . . [B]ecome good subjects, accepting the premises of the modern West without much question; become bad subjects, always revolting against the parameters of the colonizing world; or become non-subjects, acting and thinking in ways far removed from those of the modern West.” (p. 45)
To become good subjects, in Fanon’s (1963) own mapping of the phases of decolonization, is to seek to legitimize oneself by proving that one has successfully assimilated to the culture of the occupying power and thereby deserving of parity. To the degree that humanness is measured by European liberal notions of individualism, aggressive pursuit of material wealth, and the acquisition of private property, internalization and enactment of these liberal ideas becomes the requisite logic for the native compelled to prove her worth as a human being. Here, mimicry and performance of the authorized official transcript becomes the primary mode of authenticating one’s achievement of the good subject status. Today, under the regime of corporate colonization, it often takes the form of aspiration to upward mobility or simply, getting one’s piece of the pie.
On the other hand, where colonial doublespeak demands—at the same time that it renders impossible—native assimilation into the colonial polity, what has been the historic recourse of the colonized is alternatively to become “bad subjects.” In Fanon’s (1963) reckoning, this is the “fighting phase” of decolonization (p. 222). Here, the good subjects of the assimilationist phase begin to realize the futility of seeking incorporation as a route to recognition. They are therefore compelled to launch a resistance, in effect, becoming “bad subjects” of the Empire. This phase of resistance is often characterized by “the passion with which native intellectuals defend the existence of their national culture” (Fanon, 1963, p. 209) and the refusal to be subject anymore to the insults and impositions of colonial ideology. Often, the rhetoric of resistance takes the form of rejection of all things “foreign” and an urging of a return to a putative primordial past unsullied by colonialism’s distorting contaminations.
How to move to the phase of freedom, that of being non-subjects, is often a tenuous question in the experience of most liberation movements. At stake is the search for a normative politics that may bring about prospects for becoming self-determining “non-subjects” once more, no longer merely consigned to a place of reaction to the dominating power, but able to act autonomously from a new initiative, i.e., able to become a people of and for themselves and no longer as objects for others’ disposition. The Philippine indigenization movement is one such attempt, albeit charged by well-meaning postcolonial critics with “nativism” and “essentialist politics.”
Indigenization
Philippine indigenization is a cultural project whose goal is precisely to get to this place of being non-subjects. A collaborative endeavor spanning decades and various disciplines, it can be seen to have undergone the phases of reaction described in Dion-Buffalo and Mohawk’s formulation beginning with a break with the assimilationist logic of earlier cultural brokers (the ladinos and mestizos who facilitated the insertion of Filipinos into Eurowestern cultures) to undertaking what Fanon (1963) refers to as “a passionate search for national culture” (p. 209). Comprised of several strands of interdisciplinary narratives, it began with an attempt to deconstruct centuries of colonial Eurowestern epistemologies through theory revision and a re-orienting of the academic disciplines toward a more emic perspective. The project ranged from the early works of Filipino anthropologists reconstructing Philippine prehistory and culture and positing an “organic” nation, the works of Filipino linguistic philosophers asserting a distinct indigenous Filipino philosophy, those of Filipino psychologists re-theorizing “the” Filipino “personality” and challenging the universalist assumptions of a Western-oriented psychology, to the perspectives of Filipino historians that first surfaced the politics entailed in the very act of history-writing and who consequently began to undertake the massive project of rewriting Philippine history from the perspective from below.* The goal is to give rise to a knowledge regime that, for the first time, is “by us, from us, and for us” thus restoring a sense of peoplehood and a measure of agency to former colonial subjects. The project is a complex one driven by a nationalizing impetus and a vision of solidarity, yet ironically creating its own forms of exclusions. The project has been controversial from its inception, provoking charges of “nativism” and “essentialism” in its insistence on Tagalog/Filipino as the exclusive language of the discourse on knowledge from postcolonial Filipino and Filipino American scholars alike.
Nick Joaquin’s Thesis
It is in this regard that I want to engage a provocative view put forward by one Filipino writer “whose time has come,” according to some anti-nativist postcolonial scholars in the Philippine academy. Long before the successful importation of postcolonial theory to the Philippine academy in the mid-1990s, Nick Joaquin, renowned Filipino writer in English and multi-awarded national artist, proposed a thesis that might well capture the quintessential postcolonial sentiment: What if colonialism were to be reframed merely as an acquisition of tools (e.g., new language, new technologies, new social and political organization, new religion, etc.) and that all such tools, in the words of McLuhan are “media of communication” (Joaquin, 1988, p. 5)? “Thus,” he argues, “could we solve the problem that most irks us about this epoch: the presence of the alien intruder, who would then be reduced, not without honor, to the role of medium” (pp. 7-8).
Nick Joaquin is a Filipino writer in English who began his career as a writer in the mid-‘40s and continued writing up to his demise in 2004. He has earned accolades as the "Grand Old Man of Philippine Literature," receiving numerous awards for his contributions to Filipino cultural heritage as a novelist, playwright, poet, journalist, essayist, historian, and biographer. A bold and original thinker with a dense literary style reminiscent of the baroque profusion of forms, he’s been known to scandalize readers with his unorthodox and sometimes “politically incorrect” ideas. One that has raised controversy particularly among nationalists is his sentimental attachment, though not without ambivalence, to the culture of the former colonial power, Spain. Indeed one finds in his work a sense of nostalgia toward Mother Spain at the same time that he indicts harshly the American occupation of the Philippines for having decimated the local economy within a relatively short period (half a century) compared to Spain’s more than three centuries rule. Nonetheless, notwithstanding his differential reading of the disparate legacies of Spain and the U.S., it may be argued that his main thesis has relevance to the apprehension of both colonial traditions from the point of view of undoing the insults of colonialism.
Fully cognizant of the dominant nationalist response that, at its core, condemns what it considers the foreign destruction of native culture and its supplantation by Western cultural norms, he suggests an alternative tack to the implied wholesale rejection of the colonial legacy. He proposes:
The problem of the Philippine historian is how to integrate what’s felt to be a disagreeable first act into the national drama without making either the colonizer or the colonial embarrassingly prominent, and yet with no downgrading of their era; with the intent, in fact, of revealing how relevant, how important, that era was to us. (p. 5)
In other words, rather than seeking to restore Filipino dignity by rejecting the colonial legacy, the historic task must be to see such legacy as merely an “acquisition of tools.” To the question, “Can this be done?” he responds by invoking an analytical tack prominently employed in prehistoric analysis but that in modern times is all but forgotten. This is McLuhan’s suggestion that “[t]he drama of history is a crude pageant whose inner meaning is man’s metamorphosis through the media” (in Joaquin, p. 4). In regard to a re-reading of Philippine colonial history, what is proposed is a shift in emphasis
from conventional history to the history of culture, a shifting of viewpoint that would make us behold 1521 [Magellan and his crew’s arrival to the islands] and 1565 [the establishment of Cebu City as the first Spanish settlement in the Philippines] not as the time of the coming of the West to our land but as the time of the coming into our culture of certain tools (wheel, plow, cement, road, bridge, horsepowered vehicle, money, the clock, paper, book, printing press, etc.) and how we acted with, and reacted to, these tools. In short: to read this period as the epoch of “the Filipino’s metamorphosis through the media.” (p. 5)
“Here,” he suggests, “would be no need to save national pride, since this would be purely Philippine History: the Filipino at stage center; with the alien intervenor himself counting as one of the tools with which we acted and to which we reacted” (p. 5).
Critique
The thesis is a provocative one. Whether speaking of Christianity, the English language, the introduction of new crops such as corn or maize, or of new animals such as cow or turkey, or of engineering feats such as the installation of bridges and roads, Joaquin sees the resulting cultural transformations as “remarkable.” Remarkable, he notes, because it forced the native physique, psyche, and personality to undergo revolutionary change that otherwise would have been left effectively in a timeless, unchanging fixity. To insist on the nativist argument that underneath the layer of colonial influence lies an unchanged culture is not pride, he argues, “but prejudice…and grossly simplistic,” as though claiming in effect that “bah, we were unchanged by the clock” and that the “disruptions of the syntax of a culture brought on by new media” constituted no difference at all (p. 8).
The argument is seductive. It parallels on the psychological or spiritual level the notion that negative events and difficulties are what bring a person to maturity. They are stretching experiences that, when engaged without denial or shirking, have the capacity to develop one’s potential and character, as well as to exercise one’s spiritual muscles. But while seemingly reasonable or even commonsensical once its basic premise is conceded, i.e., that native peoples are less than human without the animating impetus of civilization, the claim is dangerous. For one, it falsely represents colonial domination as an innocent force for the good, i.e., merely as a necessary instrument for a people’s self-actualization and development into full human beings. Such absolution is evident, for example, in the repeated valorization of Europe’s exhortation to growth and emphasis on movement (the restlessness that is constitutive of striving, industry, and competition). Europe in this discourse is represented as the Hegelian dynamic that propels a languorous, self-content and unmotivated people to fulfill their spirit and their destiny. In concrete terms, it means being driven by the colonial impetus to diligence and to progress as realized in the mastery of nature, the development of technology, and the production and accumulation of material wealth. To be aggressively acquisitive is to be a rational human being. To merely survive on the planet is to fall short of one’s true calling as a human being and to fail to be rational; it is to be no better than a beast. For indigenous peoples then to attain the status of rational human beings is to develop “such qualities of character as industry, energy, enterprise, [and] self-discipline” (Parekh, 1995, p. 84) within the context of rational management and utilization of nature and the environment.
In Joaquin’s reckoning then, it is European colonization that shaped the prehistoric Filipino into a modern rational human being. Through the introduction of the tools of civilization, a ragtag group of tribal folk living in isolation from each other gained identity as a nation, attaining economic transformation “from a subsistence culture to ‘the first world economy of modern times’” (p. 9).
This is nowhere more evident than in his chapter titled, “A Heritage of Smallness.” Here he indicts Filipinos for falling back to a cult of small-mindedness after having acquired the tools to become master of his (gendering intended) environment. He notes:
Society for the Filipino is a small rowboat: the barangay. Geography for the Filipino is a small locality: the barrio. History for the Filipino is a small vague saying: matanda pa kay Mahoma; noong peacetime. Enterprise for the Filipino is a small stall: the sari-sari. Industry and production for the Filipino are the small immediate scratchings of each day: isang kahig, isang tuka. And commerce for the Filipino is the very smallest degree of retail: the tingi. (p. 217)
From what he sees as the unfinished revolution of 1898 where Philippine independence is said to have been aborted by the invasion of the U.S. just at the cusp of the Filipinos’ victory against Spain to the stunting of talent among Filipino literary writers who seem content to only master the short story form and not the novel, Joaquin cites evidence after evidence of Filipino small-mindedness that he sees is behind Filipinos’ tendency to stop short of the big effort. In other words, he decries the tendency of Filipinos to be daunted and crushed instead of challenged by the forward thrust of modernity and progress (he was writing in the ‘80s). He laments:
The trend since the turn of the century, and especially since the war, seems to be back to the tradition of timidity, the heritage of smallness. We seem to be making less and less effort, thinking ever smaller, doing even smaller. The air droops with a feeling of inadequacy. We can’t cope; we don’t respond; we are not rising to challenges. . . (P. 226)
The silent reproach seems to echo the self-indicting question: Haven’t we learned anything from our European tutors?
But what is left unasked in all this eloquent condemnation of Filipino character is the question of value: Whose reference point for making judgments about success or failure is being invoked? From whose perspective is colonialism celebrated as the bringer of tools needed for Filipinos’ transmogrification into full humanity? In other words, what is not called into question is the modernist assumption embedded in the discourse of progressivism saturating Joaquin’s reasoning that in itself undergirded the violent and genocidal projects of colonialism and imperialism.
Today, we face a crisis of such magnitude as to be fully imaginable by any of us in terms of all its fallout and potential consequences. It is said that we are the only creatures on the planet whose singular achievement is that of bringing our species to the brink of extinction. We are told we need new paradigms that will pull us back from the edge of self-destruction caused by our addiction to growth and the cult of progress and by our unbridled expansion and virtual takeover across the face of the planet. John Zerzan (2005), speaking from a different place, notes that “Civilization is…separation from an original wholeness and grace.” He remarks, “The poor thing we call our ‘human nature’ was not our first nature; it is a pathological condition. All the consolations and compensations and prosthetics of an ever more technicized and barren world do not make up for the emptiness” (p. 3). It is a subject for another paper, but this critique would not be complete without gesturing even only cursorily toward a whole body of literature now re-examining the turn to modern settled agriculture with the concomitant development of an entire civilizational ethic devoted to violent take over of the planet has emerged with radically different conclusions from that of Joaquin.
Returning the gaze of empire with a different gaze informed by the perspectives of those coming from below victimized by its violence—both human and the more-than-human—I am tempted to engage in an exercise of reverse recrimination toward someone like Joaquin and say that perhaps it isn’t so much the heritage of smallness that is so damnable in the Philippine case (as well as in all other instances of the subjugation of indigenous peoples); rather it is the cult of empire, the addiction to growth without limits and the arrogance of invincibility and human superiority over everything else that has plagued the planet since 1492. Colonization as a set of tools and institutions meant to subjugate the earth and “civilize” other human beings is not innocent. At the heart of it is an ideology that according to this new body of work in anthropology and other disciplines runs counter to all that is redeeming and of human value. Rather than indicting the cult of smallness; rather than charging Filipinos with the failure to assimilate and rise to the challenge of complex tools and institutional machinery, perhaps we need to recognize instead their anarchic and often stubborn insistence to remain themselves despite centuries of tutelage in awakening the killer instinct in themselves. For, let’s face it, no advanced civilization has ever been built without entailing conquest, war, the takeover of other peoples’ lands and resources, the use of slave labor, the exploitation of other beings in nature and, in the long run, the depletion and decimation of the earth. It is time we lay culpability where it rightly belongs—at the doorstep of modern civilization and its illusions of progress.
I’d like to end with an appropriate quote from William Morris (in Zerzan, 2005), writing in 1885, a banner year for ascendant industrial capitalism:
I have no more faith than a grain of mustard seed in the future of “civilization,” which I know now is doomed to destruction, and probably before very long; what a joy it is to think of! And how often it consoles me to think of barbarism once more flooding the world, and real feelings and passions, however rudimentary, taking the place of our wretched hypocrisies….I used really to despair because I thought what the idiots of our day call progress would go on perfecting itself: happily I know that all will have a sudden check. (P. 151)
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References Cited
Esteva, G. and Prakash, M. S. (1988). Grassroots post-modernism: Remaking the soil of cultures. London: Zed Books.
Fanon, F. (1963). The wretched of the earth. New York: Grove Press, Inc.
Fanon, F. (1965). A dying colonialism. New York: Grove Press.
Joaquin, N. (1988). Culture and history: Occasional notes on the process of Philippine becoming. Pasig City, Philippines: Anvil Publishing.
Mendoza, S. L. (Between the Homeland and the Diaspora: The Politics of Theorizing Filipino and Filipino American Identities. (Routledge Series on Asian Americans: Reconceptualizing Culture, History and Politics). NY & London: Routledge. Revised Philippine edition, University of Santo Tomas Publishing House.
Parekh, Bhikhu. 1995. “Liberalism and colonialism: A critique of Locke & Mill.” In Decolonization of Imagination: Culture, Knowledge and Power edited by Jan Nederveen Pieterse & Bhikhu Parekh, 81–98. London: Zed Books.
Spivak, G. C., 1988, ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ in C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (eds.). Marxism and the interpretation of culture, pp. 271-313, University of Illinois Press, Champaign, IL.
Zerzan, J. (Ed.). (2005) Against civilization. Los Angeles: Feral House.
*****
S. Lily Mendoza, a native-born Kapampangan, is Full Professor of Culture and Communication at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan and the current Executive Director of the Center for Babaylan Studies (CfBS), a movement for decolonization and indigenization among diasporic Filipinos. She is known for her pathbreaking work on the politics of indigeneity and critique of modernity particularly within the Philippine diasporic and homeland context. Among her book publications are Between the Homeland and the Diaspora: The Politics of Theorizing Filipino and Filipino American Identities, Back from the Crocodile’s Belly: Philippine Babaylan Studies and the Struggle for Indigenous Memory and, more recently, Decolonizing Ecotheology: Indigenous and Subaltern Challenges. She has also published widely in various cultural and native studies journals and anthologies on questions of identity and subjectivity, cultural politics in national, post- and trans- national contexts, discourses of indigenization, race, and ethnicity, and, more recently, civilization and climate change.
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