Asian Transformations in Action - Api-fellowships.org

228 COLLAGES OF BETTERMENTI took with me on my journey and which informed theconstruction of my proposal, but one that was decidedlyin the present.A year before I had been toying with another projectthat was more historically orientated. It arose fromthe general dissatisfaction with the quality of my ownquestions and frameworks. Browsing the shelves of anolder relative, I came quite by accident upon a book.Since I had browsed those same shelves for decades,it was clearly something in my own desire to see thatmade the book visible. What drew me to it was itstitle, embossed in faded gold lettering, The CulturalProblems of Malaysia in the Context of Southeast Asia.Out of the permafrost of a Malaysian suburb, I pulledout a fossil from the mid-1960s. The collection of essaysfrom a similarly titled conference was the product ofthe intellectual impulses of a visiting academic fromIndonesia, Sutan Takdir Alisjahbana (a man whose lifewould be worth a workshop or two). At that moment,I only recognized him as the author of a book I hadpicked up at a second-hand bookshop. My inquiriesinto the man, his milieus and the organizations hewas associated with led me into the 1950s and 1960s,a period which I had not, until then, considered ascrucial to my self-understanding. The question of howthe two decades following the end of the Second WorldWar shaped our consciousness remained on the backburner while I considered how best to shape my project.Needless to say, the year away provided me with a wayof seeing these two questions as intimately connected.In some respects, the historical project has come to seemto me to be much more urgent to attend to as materialsand, more crucially, people recede from the present.Quezon City, caught in a cycloneOne of the many of things one is likely to overlookwhen conceptualizing a research proposal (in thehumanities, at least) is the weather. I had checked up onsemester schedules and the like but I had no idea aboutthe annual season of cyclonic winds that come off thePacific Ocean and crash into the beautiful islands of thePhilippines. (I was blessed to survive the worst cycloneManila had suffered in over a decade.) In fact, I was notparticularly aware of the Pacific and its rim (home toChina and the USA) as a cultural and historical matrix.One of the most arresting images I came across while inthe Philippines was one produced by a French historian.It was quoted by a Filipino anthropologist in an essayabout the “Asian” character of Filipino culture(s). Thehistorian noted that the Philippines was the farthestpoint that Christianity had reached on its westwardjourney and the farthest point that Islam had reachedon its eastward journey. Not only did it alert me tothe need to read a great deal more about the journeyof cultures—languages, ideas, cuisine—that traversedthe archipelago but it more importantly shifted the veryframe in which I saw the country. While I had beento the Philippines on two previous occasions, I carrieda mental map that was very much like the map I hadon my wall of Southeast Asia: Indonesia and Burmaframing the left margin and the Philippines framing theright margin. There is little of the Pacific Ocean andwhat this essay spelled out for me was everything thatFilipinos share on that side of the globe, from flora andfauna to the Manila Galleon and US imperialism.My previous encounter with the Philippines—as ajournalist and as an NGO activist—was marked bya certain speed and lack of depth. I penned an article—entitled “Pinoy’s Complaint”—which recordedthe thoughts of many Filipinos I interviewed, frompolitical prisoners to activists. I had learned much butI was puzzled by the thwarted expectation that this wasanother Asian country and therefore essentially the sameas Malaysia. When it was not the same, I simply did nothave the frame to identify what this difference was.This inability to understand fully what I wasencountering dogged much of my time there. The moreI read, the more I felt I did not understand enough oradequately, and the more inhibited I became aboutasking questions. I felt that my questions were toobasic, something a primer on the Philippines wouldadequately address. Still I met with people and watchedmovies.One movie in particular struck me as incomprehensible,beautiful but “incomprehensible.” It was Lav Dias’Heremias. Nine and a half hours of landscape, emotionshalf articulated, buried deep and a protagonist, wholends his name to the movie, whose responses to a crisiscompletely baffled me. Prior to watching the movie Ihad the opportunity to ask the director what he wastrying to do with his movies and he said, “To showmy culture.” It was a question I had to ask but whoseanswer I did not have the resources to understand exceptin the most facile way. I then watched the movie andlater I read Rey Ileto’s history, Pasyon and Revolution,a history that was difficult for me to read but rewardedme later with a sense of a longer and deeper history ofFilipino culture. It revealed to me some things about theprotagonist I could previously not comprehend, like themeaning of his posture and his political imaginary. Theforeword to Ileto’s history notes that a dissatisfactionwith positivist social science coupled with a reading ofphilosophy helped him re-conceptualize this history.Asian Transformations in ActionThe Work of the 2006/2007 API Fellows