Playing with Water (18 page)

Where language is concerned, too, the Philippines’ claim to be the world’s third-largest English-speaking nation is extraordinarily deceptive but is one which the visitor to Manila might not find time or even reason to doubt. American English is very much the language of the middle-class educated, of the élites of government, commerce and administration. Most of the capital’s serious newspapers are in English as are the main American-style radio stations. Since it is recognised as an élite language English is aspired to and pretended to so that a Filipino may give an impression of understanding far more than he actually does.

The official language of the Philippines is Pilipino, which is essentially Tagalog with loan-words from other dialects. Tagalog was the original language of the people who had settled the area of Luzon in which Manila lies. In 1936 it was adopted nationally as the basis of Pilipino against strenuous rival claims from other large linguistic groups, especially those in the Visayas. Today’s Pilipino is sometimes disparagingly described as a fossil language whose purity – like that of French – needs to be preserved by an academy. Critics like Nick Joaquin make a distinction between it and
Filipino
, which they say is the language colloquially spoken by half the population as their mother tongue and by the other half as a lingua franca: a mobile, energetic Pilipino full of
argot
and borrowings and inventive formulations.

That, then, is the nationalist point of view. As regards the American English often learned at mother’s knee by phrase rather than with any real linguistic fluency, an expedient daily compromise is reached with ‘Taglish’, a bastard hybrid used by broadcasters, government officials, anyone fancying themselves as at all sophisticated. The Tagalog carries the colloquial and comprehension element, the English the kudos. At its worst Taglish is mere pidgin-Filipino and pidgin-American, as witness this extract from a film review in the magazine
Babae
(Woman):

The main purpose of this mindless stuff is not to convey information so much as make the reader feel she is ‘where it’s at’ (another favourite Taglish phrase). On the other hand at its best Taglish can show an easy familiarity with both languages which often hinges around word-play, undoubtedly one of the hallmarks of relaxed and civilised man. A banner in a demonstration in the run-up to the February election read:
Kailangan Bigas Hindi Teargas
(We Need Rice Not Teargas), a phrase whose pungency would have been lost had it been purely in either language. As for ‘na-mangle’ and ‘pagtu-twists’ in the extract above, connoisseurs of etymology will take pleasure from such cross-lingual declensions, as from the notice
Bawal Umistamby
which means ‘Loitering Prohibited’ (by extension from the phrase ‘to be on stand-by’). Thirty years ago as we plodded achingly off the rugger pitch we would say ‘Je suis utterly knackeré’ or ‘Shaggé, c’est moi.’

One cheering thing I learned on my return to Manila a month after the election was that during that tense week many of the radio stations of the capital reverted to Filipino. It was as if at a moment of real crisis all pretensions were dropped in the urgent necessity of being fully understood. It was also Manila’s way of acknowledging that the rest of the nation which might be eavesdropping could well have a genuine problem understanding English.

But at the time, when the world’s journalists were filing their reports, ‘Manila’ must have served them all too readily as shorthand for ‘the Philippines’ just as they made their own familiar nouns describe entities quite unlike those at home. It became apparent that the Philippines is most dissimilar to a Western country at the exact moment when
it is being described by Western journalists – which accounted for my sense of puzzlement in distant Italy. For when a Briton hears phrases like ‘the Government’, ‘the Army’ and – and how! – ‘the Authorities’ he knows in his heart it means the legitimately constituted, orderly, impartial Authorities of Great Britain. Transposing to a foreign country, he assumes that there, too, the Government’s writ runs the length and breadth of the land; that the Armed Forces are answerable for their behaviour and unswervingly loyal to the Crown; that in turn they are supported and obeyed. Similarly, the Briton assumes that basic services and impositions are para-governmental and that their implementation will be uniform. Barring calamities water is always on tap, the electricity always works, postal workers do not on the whole rob the mails or take unfranked stamps off envelopes and re-sell them for their own gain, nor do tax collectors go from door to door collecting income tax in cash and paying off their own gambling debts with it. Come to that, the tax collectors are seldom
fake
tax collectors, any more than the policemen are fake policemen.

I am not being deliberately obtuse. Of course journalists qualify things by referring to ‘Army factions’ (a very un-British concept) and ‘the Marcos Government’, and of course the intelligent Briton knows perfectly well that things are done differently abroad, especially in the more anarchic areas of the world. Unfortunately the vocabulary remains the same and cannot help having inappropriate echoes. The mere use of words like ‘Government’ and ‘Authorities’ sets up an expectation of something familiar, no matter how distorted it may temporarily have become. This can produce an inner hiatus, a brief moment of blankness, as when the listener to the BBC in London learns that ‘a spokesman for the Philippine Armed Forces is pleased to report the number of private armies in the Philippines is probably no more than 133.’ Suddenly he is on unfamiliar ground; there’s a contradiction somewhere, something he hasn’t been told about. Who, then, might ‘the Authorities’ refer to?

At last in increasing bewilderment and scepticism he is
beginning to approach the wavelength of a Filipino who asks himself that very question year in and year out, according to local and national circumstances. Shoot-outs are common between rival police forces in the nation’s capital, between real policemen and fake policemen, between good policemen and bad policemen, between ones on the take and others who want a slice. Units of the Armed Forces engage each other in firefights over claims of legitimacy, secret plots, over fiefdoms they have annexed as their own. Provincial governors and mayors run rackets, private death squads and goons; they keep slaves, siphon off development funds. In short there is no single writ of Authority which infallibly runs the length and breadth of the Philippines (in size the archipelago is, conveniently, comparable to the British Isles).

It is hard for people from the democracies of the industrialised West to remember how their own countries once exhibited such phenomena, and not so long ago. Surprisingly, it remains hard even when there are large-scale scandals at home to remind them that the anarchy they so readily identify abroad is never far below the surface anywhere. Even in a European country like Britain, which in certain respects has arguably become
over-governed
, there have been scandals: corruption by provincial bigwigs (Poulson), by Cabinet ministers (Stonehouse, Maudling), by London’s incorruptible Metropolitan Police (the great vice-ring shakeout of the early Seventies).

But perhaps the hardest thing to imagine is a country where there can be so little connection between the governors in the capital and the people in the provinces. As suggested earlier, a distinct rusticity can exist even in Metro Manila itself behind the whitewashed hollow-block walls erected to screen the slums from the gaze of tourists, while immemorial village life begins practically at the city limits, at least in attitude if not in aspect. From the provinces the capital is infinitely remote. What happens in Manila has almost no bearing on the way real life is conducted. Marcoses may come and go and the Manileño middle class can describe their uprising as a ‘People’s Revolution’ but in the real world the people are busy planting rice and
catching fish; the mango season arrives and improvised parties are held among the coconut palms. News of external events scarcely percolates.

Out in the country old skills remain unforgotten. What kind of disaster can befall a people who can get by even without matches? Who rely on their own abilities and on each other and never on a distant government which has seldom visited them with anything good and often with corrupt mayors, with thieving and murderous troops? If there is a national insouciance about tomorrow …
bahala na
… it must be at least partly because even quite urbanised Filipinos are often still close enough to their rural origins to feel that in the last resort they can always go back to the provinces and feed themselves. The streets of Manila are full of young people – Totoy Matias now among them – who are only months removed from a life of climbing palms and ploughing paddies. In a devastating economic crisis they might well desert the capital and its governors just as at a moment of constitutional crisis they deserted an alien language.

Knowing all this, how is one to treat those phrases like ‘The Will of the People’ or ‘National Sentiment’ or even ‘Popular Feeling’ when used, as they all were, by Western journalists about a country such as this? In Britain, a state linked to itself by television which almost everyone watches, by newspapers millions read, glutted with opinion polls and phone-in programmes and protest marches and all the democratic ways of ensuring that there actually is such a thing as a majority national opinion about almost anything, such phrases mean something. But how is consensus to be reached in a nation divided by eighty major dialects and eleven main language groups, linked by no reliable telephone network, where travel is laborious and often dangerous? A nation which in percentage terms reads little but comics if it reads at all, and from sheer force of habit mistrusts its own Press? Loyalties are to family, to
barkada
, to gang, to community, to ethnic group. They cannot reliably be used for extrapolating anything as coherent as ‘The Will of the People’. In this context the phrase means nothing so the country to which it was meant
to apply was, when I heard of it from Italy, not one I recognised.

What was it, then, this country which coincidentally bore the same name? It was largely an invention of those Western journalists who, by turns cocky and earnest, produced yet another of their homogenised Third World nations for breakfast-table-reading. In almost complete historical, political and cultural ignorance of the country they were describing they relied extensively and unconsciously on the American version. No-one is surprised at this; everyone ought to be deeply shocked. It is astonishing that a modern independent nation is seen almost entirely from the view of its old Colonial rulers. It is – for example – as if present-day Indian politics could only be explained to the world by Englishmen whose ears were still attuned to the trumpetings of the Great Durbar and Lord Curzon, for thus the long-ago fictions of General Mac-Arthur’s version of Bataan and Leyte do indeed still echo down the corridors of the State Department and hence, ghostily, over the wires of Reuters and AP.

It is America, of course, which underlies the Philippines’ history throughout this century. Or rather, it would be more accurate to say that America
overlies
the Philippines, as its strategic and economic taxonomy of the globe overlies so much of the objective reality of states and nations. In this way the entire Philippines is in one sense a palimpsest whose faint outlines stubbornly appear and re-appear beneath the guises American foreign policymakers have chosen for it: anti-Communist bulwark of South-East Asia, unsinkable American aircraft carrier, the land of Del Monte’s pineapple estates. So if one describes the Western Press’s view of the Philippines as largely its own invention, the amount of inventiveness is actually very slight. It is more a matter of
con
vention. But this convention still images an unrecognisable country, just as tourist brochures do to the lands they are trying to sell.
5

If this is true of Manila it is doubly so of the rest of the country. For if the Philippines ever explains itself to those who have the time and inclination to listen, it does so in the provinces and not in the capital, where all sorts of subtly
distorting lenses – domestic and foreign – project lurid images to suit all fantasies: city of gold, historic city, city of sin, developing city; cultural centre, seat of government, groves of academe, banking and commercial nexus, heart and soul of the nation. All are true and untrue. All, claiming everything, mean almost nothing.

What has Manila to do with Tiwarik?

I have tried to suggest how utterly remote is an islet off an island which is itself off an island province. Yet even that islet exists as a political entity, is involved in the politics of everyday living. Some years ago – long after the declaration of Martial Law in 1972 – troops stationed up the coast near the provincial capital turned up one morning in Sabay. It was merely a day’s stopover on a leisurely tour they were making of the province, which must have been a dull place for them since there was no political opposition there, no NPA guerrillas, no angry students or farmers. To fill the time they made an effort to improve their own living conditions and came to Sabay on the scrounge. They requisitioned Arman’s father’s boat for an afternoon’s drunken fishing and, having caught nothing, shot it full of holes and let it settle on the rocks off the beach. For a time it looked as though they might shoot its owner too.

Since then they demand that
barangay
Captain Sanso give them fresh fish regularly on the plausible grounds that Army food is atrocious and one of their officers is anyway selling canned stores destined for his own troops in the market at Bulangan. The quid pro quo is that the soldiers keep the village supplied with blasting caps and demolition fuses so the fishermen can use dynamite. This ensures their catches are sometimes large enough for another officer to sell off any surplus in the market at Malubog.