I have writing workshops coming out of my ears, but I happily flew down to Cebu a couple of weekends ago for another kind of workshop — an exercise its organizers called “Reimagine Pilipinas Ugma,” ugma being the Cebuano word for “tomorrow.”
Unusually, the concept paper I received with my invitation didn’t tell me what the program for the next two days was going to be or who the scheduled speakers were — only that we would be engaged in looking at our country and people 25 years ahead. It was intriguing enough that — despite having been on the road all October — I agreed to take part, not even as a speaker but a regular workshopper. I arrived in Mactan late one night after a three-hour flight delay, too late to catch the welcome dinner (the sign held up by my welcomers at the airport said it all, in the Visayan version of my nickname: “MR. BOTCH”).
Botched the evening may have been, but as it turned out, I was in great company at the Alta Cebu Resort, as I would discover at breakfast. If I needed a dose of positive psychic energy — and I did — I knew I was going to get it from this place in spades.
Huddled over coffee were longtime activist Garth Noel Tolentino, gung-ho environmentalist Lory Tan, and creative spark Jim Paredes. The workshop hadn’t even started and here was Lory talking enthusiastically about how a boatman he knew had learned to read on his cell phone, how international meetings could be held online to save on one’s carbon footprint, and how a simple design for a hydraulic pump saved a village the backbreaking effort of carrying water up a hillside. Jim was telling a story about a near-mystical undersea encounter with a giant turtle.
Noel, Lory, and Jim would be later joined by two more livewires — Sen. Kiko Pangilinan, who impressed us with his command of agricultural issues, and lawyer and Ramon Magsaysay awardee Tony Oposa, whose tenacity in pursuing environmental causes was matched only by his unflappable cheerfulness. Tony — who had come to promote his idea of reclaiming most of our public roads for the public — was preceded at the workshop by his daughter Anna, a hyperachieving former student of mine, who gave up a promising future in theater to follow in her dad’s footsteps (in this case, coming before them).
Other familiar civil-society luminaries included former Gov. Grace Padaca and former Rep. Risa Hontiveros. I also recognized and appreciated the presence of artist and curator Judy Sibayan, cultural scholar and curator Marian Pastor Roces, and NCCA chairman and composer Jun de Leon.
Over the next couple of days, however, it was the people we don’t get to see and hear every day who provided some of the sharpest insights and surprises, in word and in deed — people like the bright, young Iloilo City councilor Jason Gonzales, Panglao Vice Mayor Evangeline Bon Lazaro, San Francisco (Camotes Island) Vice Mayor Al Arquillano, Gen. Charlie Holganza, environmental law professor Golly Ramos, Bais City Mayor Karen Villanueva, and National Youth Commission chairman Leon Flores, among many others.
Again, going against the grain of most such conferences, no rigid agenda was set, no long speeches or lectures given, no firm consensus arrived at. Rather, the sense was encouraged that good things could be done or achieved at various levels of society for as long as the consciousness and commitment were there. Interestingly enough, we were expected to take a cultural approach to the examination of social, economic, and political problems — something to which I could only say, “It’s about time!”
We have national policies and programs for everything but culture, forgetting that the root of many of our problems — whether it be our notion of national boundaries, the destruction of the environment, our horrendous metropolitan traffic, our mountains of garbage, ad nauseam — lies in culture.
The problem is that many Filipinos, even those in the highest places, have only the fuzziest, foggiest appreciation of what culture truly is. Some think it means folkdancing and eating puto and pancit, especially when you’re in Manhattan on June 12th. Some think it means knowing which fork or spoon to use, or what colors and skirt lengths are in season. On the other side of the coin, some see it as whatever Willie Revillame dishes out on his TV show.
Culture should be that binding agent that turns a people into a nation — a set of beliefs, values, and goals that most citizens can share, so they can move forward with purpose and confidence. Cultural policy, cultural research, and cultural support are important, because they address questions that cannot be answered just by our lawyers, economists, bankers, soldiers, or even just by our sociologists. It takes artistic imagination to explore these issues in all their complexity, in human terms that people will recognize and respond to. Well-crafted books and movies create communities of feeling, and the best ones can bring minds together as well.
If the only thing that can unite this country is Manny Pacquiao, then we have a problem. Heroes and myths, are, indeed and however, necessary in forging our imagination of the nation. In the workshop, we dealt with the myths we grew up with — some of which we didn’t even know were myths, such as the Code of Kalantiaw, and the charge of indolence foisted on us by Spain — in search of newer, truer ones.
We agreed that we also need to rethink our notion of heroes as people who die, as the kawawa, as the sacrificial martyr. We should stop thinking of ourselves as victims, and of victims as heroes. There is nothing heroic about suffering per se. Suffering is an unfortunate condition, often the companion of heroism, but it is not heroism itself.
On the positive side, the workshop did produce general agreement on three new metaphors or symbols that could stand for the Filipino people — natural elements and images that could replace the tired old figure of the bamboo, which has long stood for our resiliency, but also, therefore, the excessive acceptance of even negative and debasing things, including servitude.
These new metaphors were the rice terraces, the coral reef, and the Philippine eagle — or, to use their native names, the payo, the gasang, and the manaul. The terraces — the only massive monument of its kind said to have been erected without slave labor—embody the wisdom of our ancestors, their ability to make good use of nature without destroying it. The coral reefs stand for the wealth and the diversity of both our nature and culture. The eagle represents our ambition and achievement, as well as our ability to prevail over adversity.
There’s a lot more work we have to do — certainly much more than weekend workshops — to begin having a clearer and happier sense of ourselves and our common future again, but Cebu was a good beginning.
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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and check out my blog at www.penmanila.ph.