When he revealed to me for the first time that there were days he'd face the mirror when his reflection would seem to be slowly fading, my anxiety over Erwin began. His mouth or nose or pair of brows would suddenly vanish in the mirror, but when he'd open his eyes again after a few seconds of shutting them, the part of his face that vanished would be reconstituted. I urged him right there and then to have his eyes checked, but the foolish one just smiled. The kind of smile that I've observed for quite a while now, which carried with it an emptiness. We don't have bad eyesight in our genes, uy! In fact, my 80-year-old grandmother still plays tong-its without eyeglasses.
Ikigai, Manu Avenido (translated by Marjorie Evasco)
This is how, while darkness
drew my profile with its little finger
I have learned to see past as Montale saw it,
The obscure thoughts of God descending
among a child's drum beats,
over you, over me, over the lemon trees.
– Ilya Kaminsky, “Praise”
I.
Mituwak na tuod ang uwan ug gianinaw ko
Ang kagabhion nga miasdang sa among lungsod.
Sa akong gipasilongan dinhi sa payag pahuwayan
Taliwa sa kabungturan, nakita kong gihiwa ang daang
Mangga sa dakong kilat nga mikanap sa kasadpan,
Gigukod sa nagdagan nga daugdog sa kasingkasing
Sa diwata sa kalikopan nga mibati’g kakulba-hinam
Sa panag-tagbo sa alisngaw sa huwaw ug sa bunok
Sa uwan, dala sa amihan karong ikasiyam nga buwan
Sa akong pagbalik sa akong naandan nga pinulongan.
II.
Mopauli ko sa akong banay, dala kining bungahoy
Gikan sa bukid nga akong gitamnan ug kalian-laing
Kahibulongang kahoy nga akong nahimamat dihang
Milangyaw sa ubang dapit sa gatuyok nga kalibotan:
Maalimyong peras, lunhaw ug lipaghong ang aping,
Masidlakong limon, dalag ug makapapas sa kauhaw
Sa ting-init. Tadlason ko ang karaang sementeryo
Diin ang akong kaliwat gapahuway sa kagabhion.
Dili nako sila pukawon sa ilang hingpit nga katulog,
Kay sama nila, lumalabay usab ako ning kalibutana.
III.
Didto sa kilid sa atabay nga gikubkob sa akong apohan,
Nahibaw kong gidan-agan na og usa ka farol de combate
Ang akong dalan padulong sa among pinuy-anan,
Nagtamod sa kinaunhang balaod sa panag-silingan:
Tabangan ang usa’g usa kutob sa mahimo sa inadlaw-
Adlawng buhat, kay kon mapawong ang suga sa gabii
Lagmit mapandol o madalin-as ang lumalabay, basin
Unyag mahulog sa atabay sa kadaghanan, mamatay.
Inig labay unya nako sa atabay, motimbag moinum,
Pasalamat sa silingang midaig sa farol sa kinabuhi.
---
I.
The rain falls lighter now and I gaze
At the dark descended onto our town.
From this mountain shelter I saw
The old mango tree struck down
By fierce lightning from the east,
Thunder rumbling in the heart
Of the guardian of the land, who thrills
To the meeting of the drought’s last sigh
With rush of rain brought by the northerlies
This ninth month of my return to my language.
II.
I will go home to my people, bringing fruits
From hills I had planted to marvelous trees
I had met in my travels in other lands
On this revolving earth: fragrant pears,
Their fresh flushed cheeks, bright lemons,
Yellow and thirst-quenching in hot season.
I will go across the town’s old cemetery
Where my ancestors sleep in edgeless night.
I will not wake them in their supreme repose,
I am transient like them, simply passing through.
III.
I trust that beside the well which had been dug
By my elders, a storm lamp had been placed,
Lighting up the path toward home, the lamp-
Lighter minding the first law of neighborliness:
To help one another as best as one can in daily
acts of living, for if the lamp were put out, unlit,
Someone passing by might stumble or slide,
Fall into the neighborhood well and die.
When I pass by the well I will draw water and drink,
Give thanks to my unseen neighbor for the light.
Translation from Balak sa Binisayà
By the author
Marjorie Evasco, "Farol de Combate" (Published in World Literature Today, 2019)
Excerpt from "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy" (1990), Arjun Appadurai
Iyer's own account of the uncanny Philippine affinity for American popular music is rich testimony to the global culture of the hyperreal, for somehow Philippine renditions of American popular songs are both more widespread in the Philippines, and more disturbingly faithful to their originals, then they are in the United States today. An entire nation seems to have learned to mimic Kenny Rogers and the Lennon sisters, like a vast Asian Motown chorus. But Americanization is certainly a pallid term to apply to such a situation, for not only are there more Filipinos singing perfect renditions of some American songs (often from the American past) than there are Americans doing so, there is also, of course, the fact that the rest of their lives is not in complete synchrony with the referential world that first gave birth to these songs.
In a further globalizing twist on what Frederic Jameson has recently called "nostalgia for the present" (1989), these Filipinos look back to a world they have never lost. This is one of the central ironies of the politics of global cultural flows, especially in the arena of entertainment and leisure. It plays havoc with the hegemony of Eurochronology. American nostalgia feeds on Filipino desire represented as a hypercompetent reproduction. Here, we have nostalgia without memory. The paradox, of course, has its explanations, and they are historical; unpacked, they lay bare the story of the American missionization and political rape of the Philippines, one result of which has been the creation of a nation of make-believe Americans, who tolerated for so long a leading lady who played the piano while the slums of Manila expanded and decayed. Perhaps the most radical postmodernists would argue that this is hardly surprising because in the peculiar chronicities of late capitalism, pastiche and nostalgia are central modes of image production and reception. Americans themselves are hardly in the present anymore as they stumble into the mega-technologies of the twenty-first century garbed in the film-noir scenarios of sixties' chills, fifties' diners, forties' clothing, thirties' houses, twenties' dances, and so on ad infinitum.
As far as the United States is concerned, one might suggest that the issue is no longer one of nostalgia but of a social imaginaire built largely around reruns. Jameson was bold to link the politics of nostalgia to the postmodern commodity sensibility, and surely he was right (1983). The drug wars in Colombia recapitulate the tropical sweat of Vietnam, with Ollie North and his succession of masks - Jimmy Stewart concealing John Wayne concealing Spiro Agnew and all of them transmogrifying into Sylvester Stallone, who wins in Afghanistan - thus simultaneously fulfilling the secret American envy of Soviet imperialism and the rerun (this time with a happy ending) of the Vietnam War. The Rolling Stones, approaching their fifties, gyrate before eighteen-year-olds who do not appear to need the machinery of nostalgia to be sold on their parents' heroes. Paul McCartney is selling the Beatles to a new audience by hitching his oblique nostalgia to their desire for the new that smacks of the old. Dragnet is back in nineties' drag, and so is Adam-12, not to speak of Batman and Mission Impossible, all dressed up technologically but remarkably faithful to the atmospherics of their originals.
The past is now not a land to return to in simple politics of memory. It has become a synchronic warehouse of cultural scenarios, a kind of temporal central casting, to which recourse can be taken as appropriate, depending on the movie to be made, the scene to be enacted, the hostages to be rescued. All this is par for the course, if you follow Jean Baudrillard or Jean-François Lyotard in a world of signs wholly unmoored from their social signifiers (all the world's a Disneyland). But I would like to suggest that the apparent increasing substitutability of whole periods and postures for one another, in the cultural styles of advanced capitalism, is tied to larger global forces, which have done much to show Americans that the past is usually another country. If your present is their future (as in much modernization theory and in many self-satisfied tourist fantasies), and their future is your past (as in the case of Filipino virtuosos of American popular music), then your own past can be made to appear as simply a normalized modality of your present.
I return to you in daydreams
Resurrected—but not quite.
Even in death,
Do I not feel alive?
The answer:
I have abandoned my peace to remain
In the iris of your eyes
We stay here—Samsara,
Lopburi,
My home now yours, and forever,
You, the seeker,
and I, practicing deity,
God only in mortal saliva,
When I open my mouth,
Watch out.
