A Heritage of Smallness PDF by Nick Joaquin

A Heritage of Smallness But till we do we had best stop talking about “our heritage of greatness” for the national heritage is— let’s face it— a by Nick Joaquin...

A Heritage of Smallness But till we do we had best stop talking about “our heritage of greatness” for the national heritage is— let’s face it— a by Nick Joaquin heritage of smallness. Society for the Filipino is a small rowboat: the barangay. However far we go back in our history it’s the small we find— Geography for the Filipino is a small locality: the barrio. the nipa hut, the barangay, the petty kingship, the slight History for the Filipino is a small vague saying:matanda pa tillage, the tingi trade. All our artifacts are miniatures and so kay mahoma; noong peacetime. Enterprise for the Filipino is is our folk literature, which is mostly proverbs, or dogmas in a small stall: the sari-sari. Industry and production for the miniature. About the one big labor we can point to in our Filipino are the small immediate searchings of each remote past are the rice terraces—and even that grandeur day: isang kahig, isang tuka. And commerce for the Filipino shrinks, on scrutiny, into numberless little separate plots into is the smallest degree of retail: the tingi. a series of layers added to previous ones, all this being the accumulation of ages of small routine efforts (like a colony of What most astonishes foreigners in the Philippines is that ant hills) rather than one grand labor following one grand this is a country, perhaps the only one in the world, where design. We could bring in here the nursery diota about the people buy and sell one stick of cigarette, half a head of little drops of water that make the mighty ocean, or the peso garlic, a dab of pomade, part of the contents of a can or that’s not a peso if it lacks a centavo; but creative labor, alas, bottle, one single egg, one single banana. To foreigners has sterner standards, a stricter hierarchy of values. Many used to buying things by the carton or the dozen or pound little efforts, however perfect each in itself, still cannot equal and in the large economy sizes, the exquisite transactions of one single epic creation. A galleryful of even the most Philippine tingis cannot but seem Lilliputian. So much effort charming statuettes is bound to look scant beside a Pieta or by so many for so little. Like all those children risking neck Moses by Michelangelo; and you could stack up the best and limb in the traffic to sell one stick of cigarette at a time. short stories you can think of and still not have enough to Or those grown-up men hunting the sidewalks all day to sell outweigh a mountain like War and Peace. a puppy or a lantern or a pair of socks. The amount of effort they spend seems out of all proportion to the returns. Such The depressing fact in Philippine history is what seems to be folk are, obviously, not enough. Laboriousness just can our native aversion to the large venture, the big risk, the bold never be the equal of labor as skill, labor as audacity, labor extensive enterprise. The pattern may have been set by the as enterprise. migration. We try to equate the odyssey of the migrating barangays with that of the Pilgrim, Father of America, but a The Filipino who travels abroad gets to thinking that his is glance of the map suffices to show the differences between the hardest working country in the world. By six or seven in the two ventures. One was a voyage across an ocean into the morning we are already up on our way to work, shops an unknown world; the other was a going to and from among and markets are open; the wheels of industry are already neighboring islands. One was a blind leap into space; the agrind. Abroad, especially in the West, if you go out at seven other seems, in comparison, a mere crossing of rivers. The in the morning you’re in a dead-town. Everybody’s still in nature of the one required organization, a sustained effort, bed; everything’s still closed up. Activity doesn’t begin till special skills, special tools, the building of large ships. The nine or ten— and ceases promptly at five p.m. By six, the nature of the other is revealed by its vehicle, the barangay, business sections are dead towns again. The entire cities go which is a small rowboat, not a seafaring vessel designed for to sleep on weekends. They have a shorter working day, a long distances on the avenues of the ocean. shorter working week. Yet they pile up more mileage than we who work all day and all week. The migrations were thus self-limited, never moved far from their point of origin, and clung to the heart of a small known Is the disparity to our disparagement? world; the islands clustered round the Malay Peninsula. The movement into the Philippines, for instance, was from points We work more but make less. Why? Because we act on as next-door geographically as Borneo and Sumatra. Since such a pygmy scale. Abroad they would think you mad if you the Philippines is at heart of this region, the movement was went in a store and tried to buy just one stick of cigarette. toward center, or, one may say, from near to still nearer, They don’t operate on the scale. The difference is greater rather than to farther out. Just off the small brief circuit of than between having and not having; the difference is in the these migrations was another world: the vast mysterious way of thinking. They are accustomed to thinking continent of Australia; but there was significantly no dynamically. We have the habit, whatever our individual movement towards this terra incognita. It must have seemed resources, of thinking poor, of thinking petty. too perilous, too unfriendly of climate, too big, too hard. So, Australia was conquered not by the fold next door, but by Is that the explanation for our continuing failure to rise—that strangers from across two oceans and the other side of the we buy small and sell small, that we think small and do world. They were more enterprising, they have been small? rewarded. But history has punished the laggard by setting up over them a White Australia with doors closed to the Are we not confusing timidity for humility and making a virtue crowded Malay world. of what may be the worst of our vices? Is not our timorous clinging to smallness the bondage we must break if we are The barangays that came to the Philippines were small both ever to inherit the earth and be free, independent, in scope and size. A barangay with a hundred households progressive? The small must ever be prey to the big. Aldous would already be enormous; some barangays had only 30 Huxley said that some people are born victims, or families, or less. These, however, could have been the seed “murderers.” He came to the Philippines and thought us the of a great society if there had not been in that a fatal “least original” of people. Is there not a relation between his aversion to synthesis. The barangay settlements already two terms? Originality requires daring: the daring to destroy displayed a Philippine characteristic: the tendency to petrify the obsolete, to annihilate the petty. It’s cold comfort to think in isolation instead of consolidating, or to split smaller we haven’t developed that kind of “murderer mentality.” instead of growing. That within the small area of Manila Bay there should be three different kingdoms (Tondo, Manila and Pasay) may mean that the area wa originally settled by three when confronted by a challenge from outside of something different barangays that remained distinct, never came more masterly, instead of being provoked to develop by the together, never fused; or it could mean that a single original threat of competition. Faced by the challenge of Chinese settlement; as it grew split into three smaller pieces. porcelain, the native art of pottery simply declined, though porcelain should have been the next phase for our pottery Philippine society, as though fearing bigness, ever tends to makers. There was apparently no effort to steal and master revert the condition of the barangay of the small enclosed the arts of the Chinese. The excuse offered here that we did society. We don’t grow like a seed, we split like an amoeba. not have the materials for the techniques for the making of The moment a town grows big it become two towns. The porcelain—unites in glum brotherhood yesterday’s pottery moment a province becomes populous it disintegrates into makers and today’s would be industrialists. The native pot two or three smaller provinces. The excuse offered for got buried by Chinese porcelain as Philippine tobacco is still divisions i always the alleged difficulty of administering so being buried by the blue seal. huge an entity. But Philippines provinces are microscopic compared to an American state like, say, Texas, where the Our cultural history, rather than a cumulative development, local government isn’t heard complaining it can’t efficiently seems mostly a series of dead ends. One reason is a fear of handle so vast an area. We, on the other hand, make a moving on to a more complex phase; another reason is a confession of character whenever we split up a town or fear of tools. Native pottery, for instance, somehow never got province to avoid having of cope, admitting that, on that far enough to grasp the principle of the wheel. Neither did scale, we can’t be efficient; we are capable only of the small. native agriculture ever reach the point of discovering the The decentralization and barrio-autonomy movement plow for itself, or even the idea of the draft animal, though expresses our craving to return to the one unit of society we the carabao was handy. Wheel and plow had to come from feel adequate to: the barangay, with its 30 to a hundred outside because we always stopped short of technology, families. Anything larger intimidates. We would deliberately This stoppage at a certain level is the recurring fate of our limit ourselves to the small performance. This attitude, an arts and crafts. immemorial one, explains why we’re finding it so hard to become a nation, and why our pagan forefathers could not The santo everybody’s collecting now are charming as even imagine the task. Not E pluribus, unum is the impulse legacies, depressing as indices, for the art of the santero in our culture but Out of many, fragments. Foreigners had to was a small art, in a not very demanding medium: wood. come and unite our land for us; the labor was far beyond our Having achieved perfection in it, the santero was faced by powers. Great was the King of Sugbu, but he couldn’t even the challenge of proving he could achieve equal perfection control the tiny isle across his bay. Federation is still not on a larger scale and in more difficult materials: hardstone, even an idea for the tribes of the North; and the Moro marble, bronze. The challenge was not met. Like the pagan sultanates behave like our political parties: they keep potter before him, the santero stuck to his tiny rut, repeating splitting off into particles. his little perfections over and over. The iron law of life is: Develop or decay. The art of the santero did not advance; so Because we cannot unite for the large effort, even the small it declined. Instead of moving onto a harder material, it effort is increasingly beyond us. There is less to learn in our retreated to a material even easier than wool: Plaster—and schools, but even this little is protested by our young as too plaster has wrought the death of relax art. hard. The falling line on the graph of effort is, alas, a recurring pattern in our history. Our artifacts but repeat a One could go on and on with this litany. refrain of decline and fall, which wouldn’t be so sad if there had been a summit decline from, but the evidence is that we Philippine movies started 50 years ago and, during the ’30s, start small and end small without ever having scaled any reached a certain level of proficiency, where it stopped and peaks. Used only to the small effort, we are not, as a result, has rutted ever since looking more and more primitive as the capable of the sustained effort and lose momentum fast. We rest of the cinema world speeds by on the way to new have a term for it: ningas cogon. frontiers. We have to be realistic, say local movie producers we’re in this business not to make art but money. But even Go to any exhibit of Philippine artifacts and the items that from the business viewpoint, they’re not “realistic” at all. The from our “cultural heritage” but confirm three theories about true businessman ever seeks to increase his market and us, which should be stated again. therefore ever tries to improve his product. Business dies when it resigns itself, as local movies have done, to a limited First: that the Filipino works best on small scale—tiny market. figurines, small pots, filigree work in gold or silver, decorative arabesques. The deduction here is that we feel adequate to After more than half a century of writing in English, Philippine the challenge of the small, but are cowed by the challenge of Literature in that medium is still identified with the short the big. story. That small literary form is apparently as much as we feel equal to. But by limiting ourselves less and less capable Second: that the Filipino chooses to work in soft easy even of the small thing—as the fate of the pagan potter and materials—clay, molten metal, tree searching has failed to the Christian santero should have warned us. It’ no longer as turn up anything really monumental in hardstone. Even obvious today that the Filipino writer has mastered the short carabao horn, an obvious material for native craftsmen, has story form. not been used to any extent remotely comparable to the use of ivory in the ivory countries. The deduction here is that we It’s two decades since the war but what were mere makeshift feel equal to the materials that yield but evade the challenge in postwar days have petrified into institutions like the of materials that resist. jeepney, which we all know to be uncomfortable and inadequate, yet cannot get rid of, because the would mean Third: that having mastered a material, craft or product, we to tackle the problem of modernizing our systems of tend to rut in it and don’t move on to a next phase, a larger transportation—a problem we think so huge we hide from it development, based on what we have learned. In fact, we in the comforting smallness of the jeepney. A small solution instantly lay down even what mastery we already posses to a huge problem—do we deceive ourselves into thinking that possible? The jeepney hints that we do, for the jeepney still right up there when it comes to the big deal. Shouldn’t carrier is about as adequate as a spoon to empty a river they have long come to the conclusion (as we say we did) with. that there’s no point in hustling and laboring and amassing wealth only to see it wrested away and oneself punished for With the population welling, and land values rising, there rising? should be in our cities, an upward thrust in architecture, but we continue to build small, in our timid two-story fashion. Oh, An honest reading of our history should rather force us to we have excuses. The land is soft: earthquakes are admit that it was the colonial years that pushed us toward frequent. But Mexico City, for instance, is on far swampier the larger effort. There was actually an advance in freedom, land and Mexico City is not a two-story town. San Francisco for the unification of the land, the organization of towns and and Tokyo are in worse earthquake belts, but San Francisco provinces, and the influx of new ideas, started our liberation and Tokyo reach up for the skies. Isn’t our architecture from the rule of the petty, whether of clan, locality or custom. another expression of our smallness spirit? To build big Are we not vexed at the hinterlander still bound by primordial would pose problems too big for us. The water pressure, for terrors and taboos? Do we not say we have to set him “free” example, would have to be improved—and it’s hard enough through education? Freedom, after all is more than a political to get water on the ground floor flat and frail, our cities condition; and the colonial lowlander—especially a person indicate our disinclination to make any but the smallest effort like, say, Rizal—was surely more of a freeman than the possible. unconquered tribesman up in the hills. As wheel and plow set us free from a bondage to nature, so town and province It wouldn’t be so bad if our aversion for bigness and our liberated us from the bounds of the barangay. clinging to the small denoted a preference for quality over bulk; but the little things we take forever to do too often turn The liberation can be seen just by comparing our pagan with out to be worse than the mass-produced article. Our our Christian statuary. What was static and stolid in the one couturiers, for instance, grow even limper of wrist when, after becomes, in the other, dynamic motion and expression. It waiting months and months for a pin ~a weaver to produce a can be read in the rear of architecture. Now, at last, the yard or two of the fabric, they find they have to discard most Filipino attempts the massive—the stone bridge that unites, of the stuff because it’s so sloppily done. Foreigners who the irrigation dam that gives increase, the adobe church that think of pushing Philippine fabric in the world market give up identified. If we have a “heritage of greatness it’s in these in despair after experiencing our inability to deliver in labors and in three epic acts of the colonial period; first, the quantity. Our proud apologia is that mass production would defense of the land during two centuries of siege; second, ruin the “quality” of our products. But Philippine crafts might the Propaganda Movement; and the third, the Revolution. be roused from the doldrums if forced to come up to mass- production standards. The first, a heroic age that profoundly shaped us, began 1600 with the 50-year war with the Dutch and may be said to It’s easy enough to quote the West against itself, to cite all have drawn to a close with the British invasion of 1762. The those Western artists and writers who rail against the cult of War with the Dutch is the most under-rated event in our bigness and mass production and the “bitch goddess history, for it was the Great War in our history. It had to be success”; but the arguments against technological progress, pointed out that the Philippines, a small colony practically like the arguments against nationalism, are possible only to abandoned to itself, yet held at bay for half a century the those who have already gone through that stage so mightiest naval power in the world at the time, though the successfully they can now afford to revile it. The rest of us Dutch sent armada after armada, year after year, to conquer can only crave to be big enough to be able to deplore the colony, or by cutting off the galleons that were its links bigness. with America, starve the colony to its knees. We rose so gloriously to the challenge the impetus of spirit sent us For the present all we seen to be able to do is ignore pagan spilling down to Borneo and the Moluccas and Indo-China, evidence and blame our inability to sustain the big effort of and it seemed for a moment we might create an empire. But our colonizers: they crushed our will and spirit, our initiative the tremendous effort did create an elite vital to our history: and originality. But colonialism is not uniquely our ordeal but the Creole-Tagalog-Pampango principalia - and ruled it rather a universal experience. Other nations went under the together during these centuries of siege, and which would heel of the conqueror but have not spent the rest of their which was the nation in embryo, which defended the land lives whining. What people were more trod under than the climax its military career with the war of resistance against Jews? But each have been a thoroughly crushed nation get the British in the 1660’s. By then, this elite already deeply felt up and conquered new worlds instead. The Norman itself a nation that the government it set up in Bacolor conquest of England was followed by a subjugation very actually defined the captive government in Manila as similar to our experience, but what issued from that illegitimate. From her flows the heritage that would flower in subjugation were the will to empire and the verve of a new Malolos, for centuries of heroic effort had bred, in Tagalog language. and the Pampango, a habit of leadership, a lordliness of spirit. They had proved themselves capable of the great and If it be true that we were enervated by the loss of our sustained enterprise, destiny was theirs. An analyst of our primordial freedom, culture and institutions, then the native history notes that the sun on our flag has eight rays, each of tribes that were never under Spain and didn’t lose what we which stands for a Tagalog or Pampango province, and the did should be showing a stronger will and spirit, more the Tagalogs and Pampangos at Biak-na-Bato “assumed the initiative and originality, a richer culture and greater representation of the entire country and, therefore, became progress, than the Christian Filipino. Do they? And this in fact the Philippines. favorite apologia of ours gets further blasted when we consider a people who, alongside us, suffered a far greater From the field of battle this elite would, after the British war, trampling yet never lost their enterprising spirit. On the shift to the field of politics, a significant move; and the contrary, despite centuries of ghettos and programs and Propaganda, which began as a Creole campaign against the repressive measures and racial scorn, the Chinese in the Peninsulars, would turn into the nationalist movement of Philippines clambered to the top of economic heap and are Rizal and Del Pilar. This second epic act in our history seemed a further annulment of the timidity. A man like Rizal that talent and cast into the outer darkness, where there was was a deliberate rebel against the cult of the small; he was weeping and gnashing of teeth: so various a magus because he was set on proving that the Filipino could tackle the big thing, the complex job. His "For to him who has, more shall be given; but from him who novels have epic intentions; his poems sustain the long line has not, even the little he has shall be taken away." and go against Garcia Villa’s more characteristically Philippine dictum that poetry is the small intense line. With the Revolution, our culture is in dichotomy. This epic of 1896 is indeed a great effort—but by a small minority. The Tagalog and Pampango had taken it upon themselves to protest the grievances of the entire archipelago. Moreover, within the movement was a clash between the two strains in our culture—between the propensity for the small activity and the will to something more ambitious. Bonifacio’s Katipunan was large in number but small in scope; it was a rattling of bolos; and its post fiasco efforts are little more than amok raids in the manner the Filipino is said to excel in. (An observation about us in the last war was that we fight best not as an army, but in small informal guerrilla outfits; not in pitched battle, but in rapid hit-and-run raids.) On the other hand, there was, in Cavite, an army with officers, engineers, trenches, plans of battle and a complex organization - a Revolution unlike all the little uprisings or mere raids of the past because it had risen above tribe and saw itself as the national destiny. This was the highest we have reached in nationalistic effort. But here again, having reached a certain level of achievement, we stopped. The Revolution is, as we say today, “unfinished.” The trend since the turn of the century, and especially since the war, seems to be back to the tradition of timidity, the heritage of smallness. We seem to be making less and less effort, thinking ever smaller, doing even smaller. The air droops with a feeling of inadequacy. We can’t cope; we don’t respond; we are not rising to challenges. So tiny a land as ours shouldn’t be too hard to connect with transportation - but we get crushed on small jeepneys, get killed on small trains, get drowned in small boats. Larger and more populous cities abroad find it no problem to keep themselves clean - but the simple matter of garbage can create a “crisis” in the small city of Manila. One American remarked that, after seeing Manila’s chaos of traffic, he began to appreciate how his city of Los Angeles handles its far, far greater volume of traffic. Is building a road that won’t break down when it rains no longer within our powers? Is even the building of sidewalks too herculean of task for us? One writer, as he surveyed the landscape of shortages—-no rice, no water, no garbage collectors, no peace, no order—- gloomily mumbled that disintegration seems to be creeping upon us and groped for Yeat’s terrifying lines: Things fall apart; the center cannot hold: Mere anarchy is loosed… Have our capacities been so diminished by the small efforts we are becoming incapable even to the small things? Our present problems are surely not what might be called colossal or insurmountable—yet we stand helpless before them. As the population swells, those problems will expand and multiply. If they daunt us now, will they crush us then? The prospect is terrifying. On the Feast of Freedom we may do well to ponder the Parable of the Servants and the Talents. The enterprising servants who increase talents entrusted to them were rewarded by their Lord; but the timid servant who made no effort to double the one talent given to him was deprived of