good friday

Tonight we head to Tanay (Club) for their Pabasa. It's becoming an annual event even though neither of us is from Tanay. But that's ok. It makes D's mom happy. She asks each year if we want to go. I rather enjoy the couple of hours we spend there. The large shrine of Marys, crosses and Santo Ninos, the tremendous amounts of food and salabat (ginger tea) in the back, the dozen or more older women and a couple of men encircled at tables chanting/singing from noon til 2am the next day, the clack of mah jong tiles in a basement room in the other building. I can't even imagine what it might be like in the Philippines.

I don't think I'd be Catholic if I weren't Filipino. (and not because most Filipinos are Catholic) I just enjoy the way Filipinos are Catholic, in many ways, our subverted religious practices of honoring the saints (technically idol worship), the need for a physical demonstration of sacrifice and penitance (the actual crucifixions and flagellation people endure), the additional wedding rituals (coins, sponsors, flowers to Mother Mary), how we pray more to Mother Mary than Jesus. Certainly, by subverting a religion to practice it in our own way, in some ways you could argue that we too were subverted. But that's the risk we take as Filipinos who constantly let in the other. You change the other, the other changes you.

I suspect it would have been no different if the Philippines had gotten Islam to a greater extent. When I was in Marawi, I saw the traditionalist women's black garb more often seen in Iran, but I also saw the same garb in pink, light blue, and yellow. I wondered in what others ways they changed the way they practice Islamic traditions. It's that need in Filipinos to be the same yet different. Thus the "h" being added to people's names, "Jhun", "Bhaby." Then again, everyone starts to do it and then everyone is back to being the same.

Yet somewhere in the subversion, we find little elements that are "so Filipino." It's hard to explain. Perhaps it's the subversion itself that is Filipino. The ability to claim something as our own. The way we speak English, the way we pray to God, and how we make it ours. It's the other who thinks we are backwards, how we don't speak English correctly. But what the other doesn't realize is that we just didn't like the other parts. We take what we want and only what we want and leave the rest behind.

The more I read Jose Garcia Villa, the more I think, only a Filipino could have written this even though his poems are not explicitly Filipino. (It's ironic really how Asian America is just now accepting him, how they tend to accept the overtly Asian writer, when Asians are not really about doing things overtly. But perhaps that's the American in us who is judging.)

His poem about taking on God, seems that only a Filipino would exact his revenge so fully as to take out even God. It's not the topic but the sensibilities, the way in which culturally we think that comes out of his writings. Over and over, people say Villa wrote ee cummings before ee cummings or was a language poet before language poetry. And all Villa was really doing was being Filipino and doing what he knew best, subverting the language of the other to make it his own. How very Filipino of him.