by Ian Buruma
1987
THE BARTERED BRIDE
I heard the story from Francisco (“Frankie”) Sionil José, the foremost Filipino novelist in English: a group of American and Filipino friends at a smart dinner party were discussing the U.S. bases in the Philippines. One of the Americans mentioned the increasing number of AIDS cases among American sailors. “That’s what you guys get for screwing us,” said a young Filipina, quick as a flash.
The image is apt. It is hard to discuss what Filipinos call the Fil-American relationship honestly without resorting to sexual imagery. Screwing, literally and figuratively, is the operative word. Filipinos’ accounts of their national history leave the overwhelming impression of a people that has been screwed by powerful foreigners (and their local mimics) for centuries. The picture of a beautiful woman in native dress being raped by the alien conquerer has become a cliché of Filipino iconography. You come across her everywhere, in movies, cartoons, novels, and on posters displayed in street demonstrations.
Power often contains a sexual element, but the Philippines is somehow special. It is hard to think of the Dutch subjugation of the East Indies or the Spanish conquest of South America mainly in terms of screwing; exploitation, certainly, large-scale killing, yes indeed, but not screwing. Is it perhaps because of a masochistic streak in Filipino behavior, a willing submission to superior might, which is degrading and at the same time almost voluptuous? As an American character in F. Sionil José’s novel Ermita observes to his Filipina girlfriend, “Filipinos get screwed because they like being screwed.” One of the best descriptions of the Fil-American relationship I have read is a 1984 Playboy magazine article about the U.S. Navy base in Subic Bay, by the American novelist P. F. Kluge. An unforgettable passage described the ramshackle pleasure town called Subic City, “Home of the three-holer”:
And now, here you are, and it looks like a Mexican town, something the Wild Bunch might ride into, everything facing a main street, with jeepney after jeepney of sailors tumbling out, the smell of barbecue mixing with diesel fumes, cute, lively, incredibly foul-mouthed girls saying hello and asking what ship you’re from and offering head, and the jukeboxes from a dozen bars playing all at once, and the song you notice is Julio and Willie doing “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before,” and you climb to King Daryl’s, where dozens of girls await just you, and you take a chair right at the edge of the balcony, with a King Shit view of the street, and you have a beer in one hand and a pork-satay stick in the other, and a woman between your legs, which are propped up against the railing, and you know you have come to a magical place, all right, a special magic for a nineteen-year-old Navy kid, the magic of a place where anything is possible. And cheap.
Offering head to whoever happens to be king of the mountain seems to have become second nature to many Filipinos. To be down there, between the legs of the Spanish friar or Uncle Sam, or Ferdinand Marcos, or whoever, has become the natural place to be. But screwing has another meaning as well: that of betrayal. Philippine history is also a story of betrayal; those who offer head so willingly usually end up being screwed in both senses of the word, the bitter and seemingly ever recurring experience of a submissive people that expects too much in return.
How did this gifted, humorous people get into such a sorry state? Stanley Karnow’s highly engaging In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines offers us many pointers. The United States, after a bloody campaign to take control of the Philippines, was on the whole a benevolent and enlightened master of what was its only major colony. José likes to remind one of the days, not long ago, when “Bangkok was a backwater, Jakarta a big village, and Singapore a sleepy colonial outpost, while Manila was the richest and most cosmopolitan city in Southeast Asia.” Why, then, has the Philippines, which had everything going for it, turned into such an unholy mess?
The first encounter with the West, in the shape of Magellan, who arrived in the Philippine archipelago in 1521, went well enough. A tribal chieftain called Humabon was converted to Christianity on the spot. Magellan named him Charles, in honor of the Spanish king. But soon disaster struck: Humabon asked Magellan to go and punish a rival chieftain called Lapu Lapu. Lapu Lapu, a fierce-looking character with feathers in his hair, didn’t take kindly to this, and his men hacked Magellan to death. Jeane Kirkpatrick tactfully reminded newspaper readers of this event in 1986, just as Marcos was digging his heels in, as a warning to Washington not to get involved in native squabbles. As for Lapu Lapu, his portrait now hangs in the presidential palace in Manila. He had been forgotten for centuries until, as Karnow notes, “contemporary Filipino nationalists revived his memory in an effort to endow the Philippines with a historical continuity that never quite existed.”
A famous Filipino historian, Teodoro Agoncillo, once said there was no Philippine history before the end of the nineteenth century. What he meant was that there was only Spanish history, written by Spaniards, mostly about Spaniards. There are no great pre-Spanish monuments, and few pre-Spanish heroes, except, of course, Lapu Lapu. The nineteenth-century Filipino elite, educated in Spanish, was quite literally the product of Spanish screwing, the so-called mestizo offspring of friars, soldiers and local girls, whose charms had also attracted many a Chinese trader. The great national hero José Rizal, a reformer who pleaded for equality with Spain in the 1890s, was, according to the historian Gregorio F. Zaide, a mixture of Negrito, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese and Malay—“a magnificent specimen of Asian manhood.”
To seek equality with the alien power is of course not the same as overthrowing it, although it could be dangerous enough. Another national hero, Father José Burgos, a mestizo and not, as Karnow calls him, “a full-blooded Spaniard,” was publicly garrotted by the Spaniards for allegedly instigating a rebellion. What he actually wanted was emancipation of the native clergy.
There is, however, a revolutionary tradition in the Philippines which occasionally finds common cause with the mestizo elite, but usually does not. It is a tradition of peasant revolts, led by messianic figures, usually many shades darker than the mestizos. In Vigan, formerly the Spanish capital of the northern Luzon, I visited the old house of Father Burgos. There was a display of pictures of a peasant revolt, sparked by the imposition of a Spanish government monopoly on a locally brewed alcoholic drink called basi. The pictures showed bands of small, dark men fighting the government militia, identified in the captions not as Spanish troops but as mestizos. This ethnic divide still exists, although it is easy to make too much of it in a country where most people, like Brazilians, are a mixture of something. José, himself a dark-skinned man with native “Indio” features, is fond of saying that “the higher you go up in this country, the whiter it gets.” A look at Mrs. Aquino’s cabinet would seem to prove his point.
It was the mestizo elite that, so to speak, offered head to foreign powers, in exchange for which service they could rule their darker brothers and sisters. This is the way it has been, and, so many say, this is the way it still is. Hence the sense of betrayal. According to Filipino nationalists (often a code word for leftists), the educated mestizos, called “ilustrados,” betrayed the revolution against Spain by cutting a deal with the Americans, after the Spaniards had been driven out by the U.S. Navy in 1898. As soon as the old one was deposed, the new king of the mountain was appeased.
Things are, of course, never quite so simple. General Emilio Aguinaldo, who fought the Americans bravely for three years after Commodore Dewey’s navy blasted the Spanish ships away, was a typical ilustrado. And, even though he cooperated eagerly with the Americans after his surrender, he wore a black tie until the day of Philippine independence in 1946, on which occasion he ceremoniously took it off. His house in Cavite is a showcase of Filipino ambiguity. The ceiling is decorated with the Philippine flag as well as the American eagle, and pictures of Filipino heroes and American presidents hang side by side, like old friends, or, more appropriately in the Filipino context, relatives.
Karnow quotes Aguinaldo’s fore
ign affairs adviser, Pardo de Tavera, to illustrate the ilustrado mentality. Partly educated in Europe, Tavera was a nationalist and a liberal who believed in universal education, civil liberty and capitalism, all encapsulated, as Karnow says, “in that magic term of the time: progress.” Not the sort of thing admired by left-wing revolutionaries, or, for that matter, right-wing autocrats. But what truly damns a man like Tavera in “nationalist” eyes is his approach to the Americans. He wrote to President McKinley, who seems to have spent much of his time on his knees asking God what to do about this new colony, which he had barely heard of before hotheads like Roosevelt (Theodore) and MacArthur (Arthur) urged him to acquire it. “Providence,” wrote Tavera, “led the United States to these distant islands for the fulfillment of a noble mission, to take charge of the task of teaching us the principles that … have made your people the wonder of the world and the pride of humanity.” To MacArthur he wrote that “all our efforts will be directed to Americanizing ourselves” in the hope that “the American spirit may take possession of us,” infusing the country with “its principles, its political customs and its peculiar civilization.”
Although it is Karnow’s thesis that these principles never took hold in the Philippines, some of the political customs and at least the forms of the peculiar civilization certainly did. Teodoros became Teddys, Juans became Johnnys, Corazóns became Corys, and Franciscos became Frankies. American public education was to change the Spanish-speaking elite into an English-speaking one within a few decades.
In The Aquinos of Tarlac, Nick Joaquin, who was educated in English and Spanish, lamented the fact that “the cultured Filipino of the 1880s … intellectually at home in several worlds … had a latitude unthinkable in the ‘educated’ Filipino of the ’20s and ’30s, for whom culture had been reduced to being knowing about the world contained between Hollywood and Manhattan.” Hence the fact that half the educated male population today seems to bear the title of attorney-at-law. Or the fact that on prominent display at the biggest department store in Manila is a large oil painting of Ronald and Nancy Reagan in formal Filipino dress. Or the fact that thousands of Filipinos apply every year to work for the U.S. Navy, and that many thousands more are waiting to emigrate to California. Or that Filipino cities all look like East L.A., with minimarts, discos, hamburger joints and honky-tonks. Amid the jumble of street signs and slogans, my favorite discovery was a sign over a funeral parlor that said, “Funeraria Rosaria: Home of the Superior Casket.” Now here is a people that has clearly taken that peculiar culture onboard. Filipinos appear to love it—although to some, of course, it might seem more like rape.
But, if so, the Americans were peculiar rapists. The U.S. conquistadors remind one of Jimmy Swaggart, praying while they sinned. They were at once racist and at times unspeakably brutal, and benign, generous and idealistic. Karnow uses contemporary American journalism and popular songs to illustrate the mood in the U.S. It was from the start one of profound ambivalence. An 1898 Finley Peter Dunne column in the Chicago Tribune is an especially effective example:
“I know what I’d do if I was Mack,” said Mr. Hennessy. “I’d hist a flag over th’ Ph’lippens, an’ I’d take in th’ whole lot iv thim.” “An’ yet,” said Mr. Dooley, “ ’tis not more thin two months since ye larned whether they were islands or canned goods.”
Mack was, of course, President McKinley—the one who went down on his knees, prayed, and realized that “there was nothing left for us to do but take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow-men for whom Christ also died.”
No doubt that was sincerely meant, in the best tradition of Yankee generosity. But it took about 200,000 Filipino lives to convince the natives. And not all Americans were as high-minded as Mack. Teddy Roosevelt is quoted by Karnow as saying, “All the great masterful races have been fighting races.… No triumph of peace is quite so great as the triumphs of war.” These feelings were echoed by ordinary soldiers, one of whom stated that “I am in my glory when I can sight some dark skin and pull the triggers,” while another observed that he would like to “blow every nigger into nigger heaven.” A brigadier general named Jacob (“Hell-Roaring Jake”) W. Smith hoped to turn one of the Philippine islands into “a howling wilderness.” This is like Curtis LeMay’s wish in World War II to bomb Japan “back into the Stone Age.”
But once the fighting was done and many “goo-goos” found their rightful places in nigger heaven, the Americans were indeed benevolent. They quickly set up an education system that was second to none in colonial Asia. American soldiers repaired roads, built hospitals, vaccinated children against smallpox, and a U.S. Army band entertained the locals every afternoon in central Manila to such inspiring tunes as “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.”
Karnow rightly compares the American colonial record favorably with that of European nations. There is a more interesting comparison, though, which he does not draw, and that is with Japan. American colonial history, such as it is, began around the same time as Japan’s. Both countries, for obvious reasons, were opposed to European imperialism, yet at the same time emulated many of its trappings, down to the white topis and classicist architectural bombast. Their colonial conquests came in the guise of anticolonialism; they were, in a sense, the first modern “liberation” movements, and, like so many such subsequent movements, they were marked by a peculiar savagery.
This might be explained by a racist element that did not yet exist in earlier European adventures. The British, the Dutch and the French did not arrive in their respective colonies to liberate anybody, nor were they burdened with racial or even nationalist zeal. They simply wanted to trade. Their empires grew out of that, though not always peacefully, of course. By the late nineteenth century it was too late for empires to grow: they had to be conquered.
The racial theories, the White Man’s Burden and all that, came around about the same time, a product of Social Darwinism. They had an enormous impact on Japan, obsessed with national survival in the jungle of struggling nations, and, as one can see in the statements of Roosevelt and MacArthur, many Americans were infected by the same virus. Trade was an added benefit, but it was not the only purpose of American or Japanese colonialism. “In their own eyes,” says Karnow, the Americans “were missionaries, not masters.” The Japanese, who felt rejected by the Western world they had wished to join as equals, went on a similar mission, but in their case—at least according to the propaganda—it was to spread the superior virtues of the Japanese race. Conquerers with missions (including the Spanish conquistadors spreading Christianity with the sword) have by and large caused more mischief than traders.
It has been suggested that American savagery in the Philippines, as well as in the campaigns at home against Indian tribes, helps to explain the brutality of the Pacific War. In fact, American brutality came to a speedy end in the Philippines, not just for moral reasons, but because the Americans, unlike the Japanese forty years later, quickly realized how counterproductive it was. Besides, as Karnow points out, it got bad press at home. And though Darwinist theories were used to justify the conquest of the Philippines, it is hard to see their relevance to American behavior after Pearl Harbor.
Karnow draws a different parallel: between the Philippine war and the Vietnamese struggle for “liberation.” He attributes the Vietnamese success to a combination of national cohesion—bolstered by a shared history, national heroes and so on—and a revolution promising a better life to the dispossessed peasantry. Aguinaldo’s mestizo elite, in contrast, fought for independence, but not for social reforms that would benefit the masses. And, unlike Vietnam, the Philippines had little national cohesion, solidarity or identity, which made it hard to find any common cause. There is some truth in all of this, but one important point is, I think, missed—a point that cuts to the core of Philippine politics today. Was Ho Chi Minh’s or General Giap’s success in mobi
lizing the people a question of national identity, or was it to a large extent something more mundane, like political coercion? Do the subjects of a communist state really have much choice when they are ordered to fight? The same is of course true of many communist reforms: they are forced on the people. Aguinaldo may not have been a great agricultural reformer, but he was more of a democrat than Ho Chi Minh.
The constitution of the first Philippine republic, promulgated in 1899, was a remarkably sophisticated document, and the new state, whose executive powers were checked by a strong legislature, was remarkably liberal. It may be that a more authoritarian leadership—especially if it had been backed by a foreign power—would have had more success fighting off an invasion, just as there are many people today who would like the Philippine government to be more authoritarian in pushing through social reforms. It may also be true that Aguinaldo and his fellow ilustrados would never have reformed their feudal society. It can even be argued, as many do, that in a democracy run by an elite whose interests are contrary to those of the masses, reforms will not be carried out. But the Filipinos never really had the chance to prove themselves as a nation, for their efforts to do so were preempted by the Americans. It seems questionable to me, in any case, that Aguinaldo’s defeat by the U.S. had much to do with the lack of cultural unity or historical heroes.
