The Artist Abroad
Imagining the Filipino
By Luis H. FranciaThis semester for the first time I taught a course on José Rizal, titling my seminar, “José Rizal and His Novels: Imagining the Filipino.”
This semester for the first time I taught a course on José Rizal, titling my seminar, “José Rizal and His Novels: Imagining the Filipino.”
Was it Oscar Wilde who quipped that one thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about?
Recently, a cache of 2.5 million files was leaked to the media, files that named holders of offshore bank accounts, mostly in the Caribbean, and shell companies of those attempting to dodge taxes.
The occupation almost three weeks ago of a village in Sabah, a Malaysian state on Borneo, by a large and armed following of the 74-year-old Sultan of Jolo Jamalul Kiram III, ended in a deadly confrontation when the Malaysian authorities sought to evict the group.
I’ll say this for Pope Benedict XVI and his unexpected announcement that he would step down as head of the Roman Catholic Church at the end of this month, and relinquish the burdens of an office that he says he no longer can carry: it’s a frank and commendable assessment of his own failed tenure, with the clear implication that faith, prayer, and an insistence on staunchly conservative views are no longer, if ever they were, enough to lead 1.2 billion Catholics into an ever more complicated world.
This is not my first time in the Yucatan nor in Mexico, and every time I visit, always as a turista (to act otherwise would be disingenuous), I feel a connection with the country, a stronger one with it and the rest of Latin America than with that country north of the border, where my wife and I live, even as the tangled layers of bloodlines, colonial history, and economic imperatives, among other things, tie us to both the Hispanic world and that of the norteamericanos.
New York—I have always been somewhat mystified by the controversy over whether or not Rizal retracted on the eve of his execution—this December 30th marks the 116th anniversary. The good friars who seemed overly solicitous concerning the fate of the 35 year old’s soul put it as a matter of defending the Catholic Church against [...]
I couldn’t quite believe it when I first heard about the Reproductive Health bill finally being passed by Congress. The final vote was 13 to 8 in the Senate and 133 to 79 in the House of Representatives. Panels from the House and the Senate need to meet to iron out the differences in their respective versions after which the final bill can then be sent to President Aquino for his signature.
This November 30th marks the 149th birth anniversary of Andres Bonifacio, the charismatic founder of the Kataas-taasang Kagalanggalangang Katipunan ng Mga Anak ng Bayan (KKK, or the Highest, Most Honorable Society of the Country’s Sons and Daughters).
While October is Filipino-American Heritage Month, it may have been simply a happy coincidence that three organizations independent of each other screened Philippine films: the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Museum of the Moving Image (MoMI), and the Anthology Film Archives (AFA). Interestingly, the screenings followed some sort of timeline, with MoMA screening a 1950 Manuel Conde film; the AFA, Kidlat Tahimik’s films from the 1970s to the 1980s; and MoMI programming the films of 28-year-old Raya Martin.
Those ignorant of history, the saying goes, are condemned to repeat it. Mitt Romney, it seems to me, wishes actively to repeat history. The policies on which he is campaigning to be the next president of the United States are of the same type that created the deep, deep hole that this country is in and that President Barack Obama has had to deal with since Day One of his term. As can’t be said often enough, the economic downturn signaled by the 2008 financial crisis is the worst since the Great Depression—not as devastating perhaps but terrible in its consequences, nonetheless.
He didn’t come as a newer version of the Thomasites, as the first American teachers were called, to preach the virtues of being a good American, nor did he come to enrich himself as a white colonizer at the expense of Filipinos, viewed condescendingly as brown little brothers. When he first arrived on Philippine shores in Leyte in 1944, William Pomeroy was a soldier and part of General Douglas MacArthur’s returning forces. Assigned to the army’s historical section, Pomeroy was one of the chroniclers of the US campaign in the Philippines. He was also a writer and a full-fledged member of the Communist Party USA.
