A series of cliches and metaphors, in story form

España Guiando a Filipinas, by Juan Luna (1884)

Content Warning: Sexual assault, domestic abuse, child abuse, torture, colonialism

Here is a story.

Once upon a time, up in the mountains by the coast, where the typhoons blew and the sand glowed bone white under the sun, a baby was born. Whether the baby was a boy or a girl didn’t matter to their mother. She loved them deeply. She cared for them and she sang them to sleep and slept with them curled protectively in the crook of her arm.

Then a man came. He had guns and he wore a gold cross around his neck like a breastplate above a coat of chain mail. And he took the baby from her and said that the baby was his. Then he tore down her house, her beautiful house, where neighbors from other islands and nearby villages would often gossip and sip buko juice. And he took the treasures from under her floor and in her ceiling rafters.

“What ugly, idolatrous garbage,” he spat, slapping the mother across the face. “You are ugly, idolatrous garbage, and so is your mongrel spawn.”

His teeth were sharp and white as he grinned hungrily at the baby in his arms.

And he burned and melted the mother’s possessions down to make coins and idols of his own.

And he seized the scorched land where her house had once stood.

As the baby grew, he forced the mother to watch: their back became bent, and their brow grew caked with sweat. The child worked the fields the man claimed for his own, now planted to cash crops, tobacco, hemp, sugar, cacao, and more. And the man laughed and laughed and sipped his rum and remarked upon how stupid and lazy the child and the mother were to other men, his fellows, who walked with guns at their belts and gold on their minds.

And he raped both the child and the mother, several times.

And a baby was born of these rapes, a mix of the man and the ones he had brutalized. And the man sneered at the new baby, but grudgingly held it close.

“This baby will be your new master when I am gone,” the man purred, peering at the mother and the child. “They are half me, and that makes them better than you by far. Treat them with the respect that is their due.”

The mother and the firstborn nodded, cowed by countless beatings and violations, by the repeated litanies of how they were inferior and inherently stupid and wrong. And under the man’s eye, they attended to the second-born with the careful reverence of those for whom the wrong move meant fresh bruises and reopened wounds and nights spent bleeding into their mats.

The man taught the second-born his ways, even as he spurned them for how they were “unclean” and “mixed,” and from a childhood with little love, the second-born grew as harsh and cruel as their father. Their insides roiled with hatred for themselves, even as they fawned under their father’s scornful eye, hungry to be known. They were torn between disdain and allegiance to their mother and sibling; torn between their hatred for their father and a desperate need to be acknowledged by him as an equal in his eyes.

And one day, just as the resentment and allegiance between the firstborn and the second finally came to a head, a woman came. She came with guns even bigger than the man’s, and she pushed him off of the mother’s land before either of the children could react.

“I’ve come to liberate you,” she declared, unmindful of the fact that they were already well in the process of liberating themselves. “And after all that mistreatment,” she carried on, “you can be truly civilized now. I’ll teach you how.”

And yes, she was gentler than the man, but still, she put all three to work in the fields and sipped her beer and said the same things the man had said, albeit in a softer tone.

One day, she pulled aside the second-born and told them, “you’ll be in charge.” She eyed the mother and the firstborn toiling under the sun, familiar scorn in her eye. “Someone has to be.”

And she slipped the second-born a Dollar bill and told them they were doing well.

The End.

Postscript:

This is about the Filipino identity, about our constant need to be acknowledged on the international stage. About the ways we hurt one another and betray each other so that we could acquire a crumb of regard from those who would never truly see us as whole. About what we had lost.

I draw from well-worn cliches about “Inangbayan” and the nation as a family, but they are, by nature, oversimplifications, and are inadequate in the face of the complex crises of identities we face.

For one, this story does not cover the complexities of the Moro experience, the IP experience, the Chinoy experience, or those of countless other groups in our archipelago. There may be overlaps, but generally, I am speaking to the amalgamated stereotypes of “the typical Pinoy,” whose experiences may or may not necessarily map to the vast and complex territories of who we are.