TUESDAY IN THE TROPICS 154
22nd May 2019
Dear friends and colleagues
I have been doing a lot of studio visits recently to artists who will be in the show I am curating in Slovakia – Far away but strangely familiar: Twenty-three artists from the Philippines. One of them is Wawi Navarroza who I went to see her last week, and we had a very interesting conversation.
While Wawi was making me coffee I glanced at the book she was reading, Authentic, though not exotic: essays on Filipino Identity by Fernando Nakpil Zialcita, published by Ateneo de Manila University Press. I opened it at one point and saw that he suggested there is no such place as Asia, it is too diverse to be seen as a coherent entity, a sentiment I heartily endorse.[1] I asked Wawi whether the book was good and whether I should read it. She thought it was, and that I should.
She told me that Zialcita claims that all Filipinos are mestizos even if they are not by blood[2], but by religion, food and other cultural elements. It is a hybrid culture which has absorbed things not just from Spain and China but from the Malays (if we do not eat with our hands, we use spoon and fork) and Americans (beauty pageants, McDonalds).
I said Britain was hybrid too, by blood I was part English, part Welsh, part Scottish, and our culture has assimilated so much from France and Germany, and is still absorbing: two-tone music, chicken tikka masala, etc. My parents, she said, were both Visayan, but they moved to Manila so she grew up speaking Tagalog. Manila is a hybrid town: we are a mix of Tagalogs, Visayan, Ilocanos, Chinese, Koreans, whatever – the “real”, or supposedly “pure” Tagalogs are more likely to be found in the Bulacan, Laguna or Pampanga regions.
“I want to make sense of where I have been and what I am,” she said. “I have been travelling for exhibitions or doing residencies a lot. I’ve been around… to most of Asia, most of Europe, Australia, US, but not yet to Africa and curiously enough, nor to Latin America which I resonate a lot with. I’ve been assimilating many places and have been transformed in more ways than one but always been a Filipina.”
“I feel Asian, but kind of precarious. When I’m in the West, they say I’m not really Asian enough. When I’m here in the East, I appear not Filipina to some. There’s another kind of question ‘What sort of Asian are you?’ I guess, a BAD one! Hahaha. If you come to think of it, we’re not in sync. with the romantic stereotype; like most Pinoys, I’m not a mild-mannered/zen/buddha Asian, I don’t bow, eat with chopsticks, nor write with a native script… not too ancient or exotic enough! Hahaha. Kidding aside, this is what makes us peculiarly Filipino compared to our neighbours actually. When I was recently in Laos for a contemporary art survey show on South-East Asia, it was really remarkable to experience the subtle but notable differences to the Indochina landmass SEAsians (Thais, Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians…). They all have the Mekong in common and I was from the islands. In Laos, the food is similar to Vietnamese, the language similar to Thai. Temples everywhere, they’re all comfortable with chopsticks, their cordial bowing admirable even among the hip and young. Compared to them, I can feel a much stronger connection to a loud Hispanic, Latin sense of humour. Of course, I identify with eating rice and with the more communal way of doing things, but our melodramatic way of doing things is more like the Mexicans. I got on so well with the Spanish and their humour when I lived in Spain – they call it catholic humour. I don’t know exactly what that means but I’m guessing the passions (biblical drama) and pleasures (fiestas); we laugh off the human condition. It’s warm; not dry like English humour which is hard to describe but fascinating!
“We are not self-exoticising, we look at different ways or different possibilities within the region. Often these are ways of adapting.”
And famously, I added, Filipinos are unusually good at blending onto other communities – and sometimes called chameleon-like for being able to do it so well.
Why did the Filipinos absorb Catholicism so readily? I asked.
“I learned you either assimilate or repel an outside or other culture,” she replied. “The lowlanders like the Tagalogs and Visayans assimilated, the highlanders like the Cordilleras repelled. Perhaps we assimilated Catholicism because it was fused with our pre-existing pagan/animist/mystic rites and rituals. A god inside a god. Have you noticed that in all the many apparitions of the Virgin in the Philippines she emerges in a tree? We also got a hybridised Mexican-infused strain of Catholicism.
‘”But then I also like the stories from the islands, even in contemporary times, like how this or that family is cursed and had to flee to the mountains, strange secrets, oddities, and so on.”
I remarked that Filipinos traditionally apologised to a tree before cutting it down. They were and still are in some respects, animists. We are too. We have placed a spirit house under our largest mango tree to placate the spirit in it. The idea of a spirit house is more of a Thai thing, though our house is based on one I have from Borneo (Kalimantan). But hopefully it works here too.
“Zialcita thinks religion is key,” Wawi said. “I’m fascinated by this syncretism. All of this condensed into what Nick Joaquin coined as the ‘Tropical Gothic’. I can’t find the quote now but one critic in an essay called ‘Tropical Gothic: Nick Joaquin Revisited’ described him as, ‘the Filipino as Spanish colonial, as Yankee colonial, as postwar displaced person, as mod swinger, as an Asian with a Gothic soul. The themes are religion, sex, history, and the mystery of time.’[3]
“I have made many notes to define the genre. Mostly refers to literary work but to me, these are pictures, pictures, pictures. For example, ‘Gothic elements are in full flower here. Lush prose.’ Check (and check out the opening and final paragraphs of ‘May Day Eve’). ‘Melodramatic situations.’ Check. ‘Folklore and centuries-old Catholic rites.’ Check and check. ‘The Spanish colonial past in all its baroque splendor and excess.’[4] Check, check.”
What about the culture of amnesia, I asked, this willingness to forgive sinners – you look at Philippines politics and it is full of people who have been convicted of gross corruption: Imelda, Erap, Gloria. They get pardoned and voted back into office!
“The culture of amnesia maybe is a coping mechanism,” she suggested. “This urge to forgive is a form of fatalism I guess, humanizing sins and errors like telenovela characters, nobody is perfect, let us not confront the ugly and instead pin our hopes and dreams to the people with a compelling backstory, a dirty past, the penitents, the comeback kings and queens, the redeemed in the drama of the everyday. A slice of the cake we can lump into the ‘Tropical Gothic’. Quite my obsession. It’s mad, it’s colourful, it’s full of life, absurdity and high drama! In my barangay, in the same week I’ve witnessed the Holy Week parades, as well as the carnival that is Filipino election campaigning and at the street corner a makeshift stage ‘Ms. Gay Palawan’ where each contestant announced themselves Miss Colombia! Miss Zimbabwe! Miss Thailand and so on. All those things happening together at the same time!”
We talked about the stereotypes that Filipinos suffer from and how there is a need to escape from an historical sense of condescension – something all colonised people suffer from. Typically, the Americans used to refer to the Filipinos with that nauseating term, “our little brown brothers.” You get it within Asia too, as with the Korean politician who called the Philippines a nation of servants.
“When I was in Spain,” Wawi recounted, “someone said to me, ‘you can’t be a Filipina! So… You’re not a cleaner, you’re not a whore, so you must be the daughter of a rich, dirty politician.’”
As Wawi pointed out, “belittlement can lead to self-belittlement which is often manifested in a common Filipino failure to accept accountability, ‘no, it’s not my rubbish, I don’t have to pick it up.’ Often people would rather disappear than be found out. The machismo of some Filipino males is a compensating device.”
We talked about her work as well, of course! She is planning a suite of self-portraits and “neo-tropical tapestries” The self-portraits range from one she made in 2016 when she was recovering from dengue, dressed in floral prints, surrounded by plastic flowers (and entitled after the poem by the Indonesian poet Chairil Anwar “I want to live a thousand years more”) to one where she poses as Zurbaran’s Saint Lucy but with mandarins instead of eyes on her plate, to a new one of her with blonde hair and blue eyes. Plastic flowers and fabrics are key elements in this somewhat quizzical but elegant evocation of the nep-tropical gothic. I am looking forward to seeing the completed suite in Slovakia.
Speak again soon
Tony
- In a book I once made the same claim rather bluntly: “there is no such place as Asia”, culturally the Islamic world, the Indian sub-continent, China and Japan are all distinct entities. South-east Asia is a remarkably heterogenous region shoved between China and India. See Tony Godfrey & Keiko Hooton. Contemporary Photography in Asia. Prestel. 2013 ↑
- Many Filipinos have some Chinese or Spanish blood. ↑
- “Tropical Gothic: Nick Joaquin Revisited” by Joseph A. Galdon, Philippine Studies vol. 24, no. 4 (1976) 455–463 ↑
- “Tropical Gothic” by Caroline S. Hau, Manila Review, 2015, http://themanilareview.com/issues/view/tropical-gothic ↑