The Eye Of The Fish. Luis H. Francia
to know how to tickle their vanity, and sometimes how to confuse them as well—a delicate, balancing act. Those who could do it best were the tribe’s shamans, embodying both oracle and fool, seer and standup comic. Too bad they didn’t wash with the Christian god of uptight Iberian friars, a god who didn’t know how to have fun, except of course at the expense of his darker charges.
To the Cordilleran highlanders, how useless it would have been to build structures other than those meant for the daily business of living and planting. Nothing could compete with the grandeur of these mountains that reminded them of their own physical frailty, and the constant need for both humility and cunning in the face of heaven’s power. By the coastal areas it was different, or rather had become different: the sense of self, of culture, may have been akin to the brethren in the highlands but the Spanish—the European—sense of narrative, of linear history ever onward and forward, stressed the creation of visible symbols that would attest to the ascendance of man over space and time. The stone churches that the Catholic faith prompted converted lowland Filipinos to build came to embody the colonized’s own sense of history, substituting one set of public, more grandiose symbols for another. In the lowlands, as native bequests grew fainter and fainter, the need for preserving post-Magellanic artifacts grew correspondingly. And so the dominant feeling among the lowlanders, and I was one, was that colonial history was all we had, tying us, at the same time that it made us supremely adaptable, to the demands of an imperious West. It was easy for the glib foreigner to view local culture through a jaundiced eye, dismissing it as a pale imitation of a Western model. Where were our Borobudurs, our Angkor Wats? Indeed, measured against our regional neighbors, Filipinos seemed to be less Asian.
And yet the dissolution of ties to a pre-1521 culture could never be complete, being too much in the blood and memory of a race, even if only vestigially. That inchoate awareness was revealed obliquely in the way that the Igorots, along with the Muslims in Mindanao, were often referred to as “genuine” Filipinos. This thinking assumed that the colonized and Christianized lowlanders were less than Filipino. But the term “Filipino” was itself problematic, derived from the name of Felipe II, the sixteenth-century Spanish king who never saw the archipelago of more than seven thousand islands named in his honor. In that faraway royal court, did illustrious, unwashed Felipe ever dream of these islands, a Christian wedge in a Muslim world, its wooden crosses raised against the Crescent, its friars’ prayers countermanding the call of the muezzins?
Trekking back from Batad to the main road, I look behind and notice a mongrel bitch following me, her teats no longer heavy with milk. Every time I stop, she stops, regarding me as intently as I regard her but keeping her distance. Each time I resume, so does she, keen on keeping me in sight. From time to time she is right at my heels, making no sound at all. I wonder if she is a benevolent dog spirit, attaching herself to me for my protection. Or perhaps it is the other way around. By the time we get to the road, she trots around me in a rite of encirclement. Speak, dog, tell your story. But she heads off in the opposite direction, disappearing around a bend, a silent emissary of the Cordilleras.
A COLD RAIN FORCES ME AND THE REST of the bus passengers to draw up the wooden window shutters. The night mist and city lights imbue Baguio City, the Cordilleras’ administrative and political capital, with a spectral appearance. During the early part of the twentieth century, the American colonial government sought relief here in Baguio from the intolerable summer lowland heat and humidity. Officials asked Chicago architect Daniel Burnham to draw up plans for a hill station, for a population that was estimated to grow from twenty Ibaloi households—the original inhabitants—to twenty thousand. Today, city dwellers number close to half a million, spread over fifty square kilometers of hills and pine-forested slopes.
Occupied by the Japanese and devastated during World War II, the city was quickly rebuilt after 1945, becoming once again the country’s summer capital. Burnham’s handiwork survives in the design of the city center, which includes a City Hall that looks much like Manila’s, a willow-fringed park (named after Burnham) with its boating lagoon, and a complex of roads leading to the city’s several districts and to points further north and east. In 1990, the city was devastated again, this time by the same earthquake that crumpled Dalton Pass. Several hotels collapsed, along with scores of residences, many of which were flimsily built squatters’ homes. The city’s funeral parlors were unable to handle the sudden increase in business, and so bodies were strewn around the parks, and the air was filled for weeks with the stench of death. The lowland press speculated on the city’s demise, but in little more than a year, Baguio had recovered, had started to attract visitors once again. How could it be otherwise? In these mountains, death by earthquake was a given, was a part of living.
I love this city, balm in childhood and adulthood, a much-needed refuge from Manila’s murderous premonsoon heat. Horseback rides at Wright Park, boating on Burnham’s artificial lake, walks on Session Road and up and down a city that sloped every which way—these were the sum and content of my childhood trips. As a boy coming to Baguio for family vacations, I would eagerly await the smell of pine to waft through the car windows, a smell that heralded a world different from the humdrum one of Manila. Today that scent has all but vanished, replaced by diesel fumes. Militarization in far-flung areas and the corresponding influx of the poor and the dispossessed, together with the lax enforcement of zoning and environmental laws, have resulted in trees being cut for fuel and building material.
On the wall of her apartment in Arlington, Virginia, my mother has a photograph of me—I must have been five years old then— together with my brothers and sisters, astride ponies in Wright Park. Riders and animals look docile, bemused. The ponies’ handlers— tough but gentle men, Igorots whose land this once was—are nowhere to be seen, shunted off camera. They were largely invisible to us, forming part of an exotic backdrop to our vacations. As a child I knew nothing of them, only that they were different from us, Other. I had no idea then that they had had a long history of resistance to foreign incursions. In Manila, my only encounters with them had been in the hunched forms of elderly Igorot women who went begging from door to door. For them to be on the coast, in the indifferent embrace and oppressive heat of Manila meant the abasement of a proud people, a culture exploited by and under siege from consumerism.
In the 1970s, however, spurred by the excesses of the Marcos regime and by militarization, the Cordilleras became once again a center of resistance to lowland oppression. Quiescent warrior traditions were revived, and the communist New People’s Army found a secure refuge in the mountains. The government in Manila realized that its hold up in the highland was shaky—had in fact always been shaky. Highland resistance to the Marcos regime reached its peak in the vigorous opposition to the proposed building of the Chico River dam, which would have inundated the ancient burial grounds of the Kalinga tribe. The Kalinga and the NPA formed a tactical alliance, but it was the military’s subsequent 1980 assassination of Macli-ing Dulag, a charismatic Kalinga chief, that provoked widespread outrage, ultimately forcing the cancellation of the plan to build the dam.
With the collapse of the Marcos regime in 1986, a lot of windows had been thrown open, to get rid of the musty air. And in Baguio, several well-known artists—who either had been born there or had chosen to live there and all of whom had lived in the West a while— began to meet informally, began to talk of what their art meant to them, began to think of themselves as a collective, as part of a nation perenially plagued by self-doubt, by uncertainty in the way it dealt with cultural issues. The result of these meetings was the formation of the Baguio Artists Guild.
One of its prime movers and founders is Ben Cabrera, also known as Bencab. A tall, balding, bespectacled man, Bencab is a well-known painter and printmaker who had lived in London for fifteen years before deciding to return to the Philippines. He has settled here, away from the big-city sophistication and pace of both London and Manila. I had last seen Bencab in New York in the early 1990s, where he had had a one-man show that explored the quake that leveled Baguio. I visit him one afternoon, and as we sit in his studio sipping coffee and gazing out at the city, he tells me about his artistic odyssey.
Bencab is illustrative of the Filipino artist who had once looked to and lived in the bosom of the West, secure in the belief that he was where he should be, only to find that the journey West was really a journey East. That journey began in the 1960s when he was offered