Year 2007

OFW 3: A Reminder To Myself (part 1)





I have heard the news of Mang Doming’s demise today. It saddened me but not very much. It reminded me of deaths similar to his. Similar is the word to describe them, I can’t think of any better word. Mang Pascual, Mang Ben, Mang Doming, Mang Rey were all similar. All of them died of poverty and old age, of diseases left untreated due to lack of money, leaving families that are totally destroyed. Their children are scattered in squatter settlements, some of the boys are jailed for drugs, some of the girls got hooked to some old rich and dirty men producing bastards. Almost all of them, thieves.

Their wives virtually became paupers on street corners who, like in the case of Indang Mengay, the wife of Mang Bel, had eaten a sack of garlic praying it would solve her high blood pressure. She died anyway, not because of hypertension but because of starvation. What can garlic do to you if it’s all you could afford to eat? And the smell of her breath! The others were hired as servants among different families; others became laundry women; all were shunned by everybody because they spared nobody in begging or borrowing. My mother had lent money to most of them, usually out of camaraderie. One of Mang Bel and Indang Mengay’s children named Jose, went as far as begging at the church, his skin full of psoriasis. His fate you won’t wish even to your worst enemy. He was reduced into a beggar in the church where everybody recognized him, whispered about him, children taunted him. While begging he was scratching his body with flakes falling off his skin like an animal of some sort. It was shameful. It was miserable. In one form or another, this terrible destiny had befallen this group of families. You see, when I was a child, these families were considered the most blessed and richest. I am here to figure how and why they failed.

Let me begin by way of recollection because it is imperative that I dig into my town people’s history to give you a better story. Or at least a complete one. I want to see and show the depth of this calamity.

What kind of culture and mentality could summon such evil force to alter a family’s fortunes? What made its destruction a possibility and is it something that happened and still happening today? In a town like ours, (our Catholic Church alone is nearly half a millennium years old), we have a culture as old as that at least. Sadly by the way we act at times, we have not a single notion where we started and how we started. We have no idea how our manners, our thinking, our reasoning, our traditions and superstitions came into being. What composed them? Who pioneered them, how did they spread among people and among so many generations? Who chiseled them in our brains like indelible ink? And why are we so ignorant of them nowadays as if confined within the membrane of an egg, buried in the earth, unfertilized, un-hatched, deprived of incubation? Why are we dead?

Is geography the answer to all these? In my town, if you look around you, the volcanic soil is so fertile that you really need not work hard to earn a living, wealth is acquired with the least effort. More so in the old days when the town was full of natural resources, it was so rich the Spaniards immediately claimed it their prime stake because it had the best potential of harvest, which in taxation terms, provided the most revenues.

I take the liberty of considering the Spanish arrival as the sexual intercourse between the natives and the whites that led to what our town has become nowadays. Oh yes, there was a major difference between the before and after the intercourse. There was liberty before, then oppression after. There was equality before and class distinction after. This intercourse was the zero ground of my town’s failure and abandonment of memory. It is the root cause of its abysmal performance.

Memory is not a matter of intelligence, it is connected with the genes. It can be suppressed but it keeps on prying open a window in the remote corners of the brain, trying to re-arrange its data, revise its history, connect the many loose threads of thought just so to arrive at dynamic conclusions, conclusions that have no permanence. The way my memory arrives at conclusions right this minute.

Surely, I tell myself, my native forefathers had a significantly different frame of mind before the Conquerors came. In my mind I envision what life could have been before the Spaniards and the Americans and the Japanese. I see my naked self, tattooes drawn all over my skin, my tongue speaking the language only a handful could understand. I imagine myself walking on the primitive roads within thick forests, only concerned about my next meal. If I had a company, I would only be concerned about how we would go about hunting for the next meal or which of the wild crops are edible. My memory is capable of recalling those images, just like the images we as a people collectively resurrect without us discussing about them beforehand. In my mind I always see my primitive self under the peeking sun in-between mountains. I stare out there to the endless horizon painted in green. That is before the Conquerors.

After the Conquerors, I become tied up to a foreign blood, all of a sudden, I have a forefather from Europe, making me partially white and maybe partially superior. In this new half-breed or by extension multi-racial personality, I begin to claim the culture that is not native to my country of birth. I begin to entertain the idea that I am not fully integrated to this soil and I must think the way the Conquerors think. The degree of my separation from others becomes dependent on my resemblance to the physical features of the Conqueror – white skin, even teeth, tall, body hair, long legs, domineering – it seems that my near resemblance to these foreign features guarantees my social position and separation. The way the real Spaniards are separate, the way the Americans are separate, the way, Conquerors are separate. Dominance comes with the ‘looks’ territory. This faulty superiority or concept of superiority is carried through my history, getting into convolutions and many mutations and now is the attributable cause of the failures of the families I am referring to in this story.

That sudden change of mentality is the ground zero of my present frame of mind. That is the germ, the seed from which everything emanates. Somehow I have forgotten that no matter how I look like, I still am a product of this soil and an offspring of a primitive time when social class does not rely on physical attributes. Sometimes I see the prehistoric attributes of my past, beyond my age, beyond the age that I know, these are sporadic glimpses and pictures of a time only my genes can carry, not my memory. These are mirrors that are reflected in space and time before the mist of forgetfulness fogged them from view. I alone can imagine impressions such as these - the structures of prehistoric houses, how the natives gather, how they treat one another, their criteria for superiority, what they are aspiring for – these flash in my mind though not clearly defined. I feel them, like when I wake up in the morning and I feel I’ve just slept on an open field under the stars. Sometimes I stop on my track and I can see clearly a woman carrying a big earthen jar on her head, walking beside a lake so silvery and so quiet and so lovely. Sometimes I feel myself sitting in the corner of a palm house, surrounded by men who are speaking in low tones, like warriors weary of a spy amidst them, careful not to disturb the peace of their wives and children. I can picture the house vividly, sharp right angle corners, floor assembled from straight slabs of bamboos tied up in parallel, covered by buri mats that bear geometric shapes weaved in mathematical precision. And I feel the gentleness of these men, their soft spoken discourse, their propensity for contemplative thoughts. I see their utmost respect for one another. Then I feel the community of farmers and fishermen and hunters. They are patient with their harvests. They are always finding ways to improve their tools. They are a busy people.