Nation and Ed Angara's old maps

I was in Makati the other week attending the launch of Senator Ed Angara’s book on Philippine maps. The occasion also coincided with his 75th birthday; being a national figure, his guests were an amalgam of the Manila principalia — politicians, bureaucrats, capitalists and the culturati including this tired, old hack.

The book came out that very day; I had not read it yet so I didn’t comment on it. I talked instead about the celebrant. But before doing this, I deviated.

An interesting program was going on and all the while, a big portion of the audience in the back was noisily talking and disturbing the whole proceedings. The annoyance was made by well-dressed, well-informed, well-fed people — not the rabble. Right there, for all of us to witness, was what has always afflicted this nation. Our comfortable elites, wala silang paki!

I then noted that Ed Angara comes from Baler. Another outstanding personality from Baler was our first president, Manuel L. Quezon.

Being this ancient, I have had a good view of our recent leaders starting with Quezon. Since 1935 till 1941, he proclaimed his nationalism loud and clear at the Luneta every Nov. 15 during the Commonwealth Day parade. Our leaders — then and now — they all do this as a matter of form, and all of them are 10 feet tall.

But then sooner or later some reduce themselves to pygmies when they oppose agrarian reform, feather their nests with our money and collaborate with our colonizers. Their nationalism has lost its social meaning, and became verbose cant.

Now comes Ed Angara who, in all these years, has done a lot as lawmaker, educator and cultural leader. I said he stood as tall as Quezon, his townmate, and perhaps, just perhaps — and here I am extremely biased for I have known Ed for so long — is an inch taller. Ed’s nationalism is anchored in his hometown, Baler; the people of Baler can testify to this, it then extends outside, to people who benefited from the laws he authored, the philanthropies and cultural programs he promoted.

And Quezon’s?

Forgive me if, once more, I mount my old soapbox and talk about a compulsion whose impetus derives from a basic sentiment — the self-determination — that is strongest in a colonized and often brutalized people.

In building a nation, we must understand the desire of individuals as well as ethnic groups for autonomy as a means by which they can attain social justice. But the limits to this ideal must be made clear — that individuals and minorities belong to a larger community which, because of its bigness and numbers, can provide them strength and, therefore, possibilities for progress.

This principle is most evident in America, in the federation of states with their own laws and Constitutions. There is something basic, and instructive in Abraham Lincoln’s faithfulness to the Federal Constitution which unites them, for it is such faithfulness which enabled America to endure and prosper. Early on, in that epochal Civil War, Lincoln recognized — and this our minorities particularly our Moros should also recognize — that “if we must hang, we should hang together.” Not separately.

In this demand for self-determination, it is necessary for the claimants to know that they cannot create a separate nationality where the foundations for it already exist. Those limits should also inform them that self-determination may transform them into easy prey for marauders of whatever persuasion and ideology — that self-determination debilitates rather than fortifies. The new boundaries they want to draw may become the very beginning of their fragmentation.

We see this principle at work in the individual, in a solitary dwelling isolated and vulnerable. We see this in the proud medieval castle on the mountaintop unable to withstand a siege, and can easily be starved if it loses the support and, most important, the cohesion that welds it with the peasant populace which surrounds and sustains it.

We saw last year the near collapse of the global financial system which, as some predicted, ushered the weakening and eventual demise of the nation state to be replaced as urgently as possible by globalism as the only way by which financial order, including the global response to climate change, may be affected.

Must nationalism then give way to a broader view? This is the understanding of the world powers which have increased their organized clout from the so-called G7 to a more expanded G20.

This, however, does not mean the diminution of the nation state; on the contrary, for us Filipinos, all the more should such a development strengthen our resolve to be the nation that we should be, to fortify our cultural identity so it can withstand the homogenization which globalism inevitably incurs — the insidious decay, all those dulcet harbingers of so-called Western values — we must re-examine, even question them.

The book of early Philippine maps which Edgardo Angara produced also shows in such clear detail how the geographical boundaries of our country were drawn, and shaped by a colonial power. Such maps situate us and that place in the sun should not be the implacable finality with which the mapmakers have imprisoned us.       

I first became interested in such relics in the Fifties when the late Carlos Quirino, historian and National Library director, showed me his own collection and with them convinced me that Enrique, the slave of Ferdinand Magellan, was Cebuano. It was Enrique who truly first sailed around the globe. He contributed to our maritime tradition about which I will write in a forthcoming issue and describe the pioneering maritime family, the Aboitizes.

We can see, in the first attempts to draw the exact configuration, a country’s boundaries which are sometimes tyrannical because such maps shackle a people, imbue them with isolated perceptions, with us Filipinos the island mentality. Fortunately for us, as evidenced by our millions of overseas workers, we have hurdled the physical limitations imposed on us by such maps, but — as I explained earlier — they imposed on us an inward-looking sense of nation that resulted in us doubting ourselves, our capacity to grow and expand.

Already, millions of us have broken free from them for we have become a very cosmopolitan people. But in the end, we have to be where we are, to make this nation bloom, not with just our talent but with our inherent heroism.

It is those nations that are firmly secure in their national status that have prevailed. The maps these nations drew were internalized as impregnable beginnings — and from there, they expanded not so much geographically — but in the breadth and width of their nationalisms. A long and shared history of sacrifice and suffering bonded together these disparate and self determined individuals. In the end, those clear boundaries that define a nation — their maps — were drawn not with ordinary ink but with blood.

While it is true that millions of Filipinos have traveled abroad, and that from the earliest times of our written history, we have ranged the seas, somehow we have never transcended the narrow compass of our geography, imprisoned as we are in the insularity of our island mentality.

Why haven’t we brought back the applicable examples of modernity and efficiency that we have seen abroad, from our very neighbors? Why do our overseas workers — when they come home — revert to the old habits of work and thought, eschewing as they do those important educational experiences they have gained elsewhere?

We cannot see initiative and even imagination in the growth of our cities, in public order. In our arts, there is so much that is wanting not just in craftsmanship but in creativity. We repeat all the mistakes committed a few decades, a hundred years ago. What does it take for us to free ourselves from the tyranny of the mental and ideological maps that we have made ourselves?

It used to be quite normal for taxi drivers in Tokyo not to know very nook and cranny in that most exciting of cities. Not anymore; the other year while we were there, a cab driver merely pressed the knobs of a small frame above the wheel and immediately a map materialized, plotted the way, the streets and even the approximate time it would take us to reach our residence. That amazing pathfinder which is one of the new marvels of navigation was aided by a satellite high up in space.

How wonderful if every human being would have embedded in his brain a similar instrument which would map out for him not just his mortal journey but what it would take to get to his predetermined destiny.

But that internal map should never be, for it would banish the intrinsic wonder, the joy and romance of our very existence. Maps are therefore not the tyrants that we sometimes presume they are. To create them — and for them to define us — is the energizing challenge to any people who aspire to be a nation.