DivingBoard

Working on my dissertation, or at least thinking about it at some capacity, puts me in contact with the Philippines everyday.  Sometimes this is a Philippines, a Manila, which I recognize: the wall of heat which surrounds then penetrates the skin, the smell of exhaust and trash, the sea of people with brown skin and dark hair, like mine, just walking and walking and walking up an down crowded aisles at any given mall, horns blaring from buses and cars and jeepneys all fighting for space within this urban landscape all of which, at first, assaults the sensibilities of a body that has become used to the complacency of California living.  In no time, though, my body remembers that this was (is?) home and that the seemingly frenetic pace of Manila becomes, once again, the familiar rhythm inside my chest and I sway and yield to this rhythm instinctively as one would surrender to a long lost love.  

Many times I encounter an uncanny Manila, the stuff of urban nightmares, the seat of colonial anxieties, of imperial desires and capitalist excesses.  This place makes my skin crawl, my heart ache and it makes me look longingly elsewhere.  This unfamiliar terrain is certainly a product of my own imagination, the place where actual experience and idealized childhood memories cannot construct and therefore must invent.  But often this unfamiliar Manila comes from the projections of other transnational bodies, coming and going as they please, signifying and representing the urban horror which they themselves have had a hand in creating, whether they recognize it or not.  These hypermobile, transnational bodies conduct business or seek pleasures beyond the imagination of their mundane lives.  Manila is the gateway for the fulfillment they seek and as they unload their Dollars or Yen or Euros onto this landscape, the Philippines of my dreams is transformed and alas, becomes unrecognizable.

Then again, it has always been this way, hasn't it?  It has always been an imagined place.  The Philippines, with its 7,000 islands, has always been a place of fantasy, a nation imagined by Spain, the United States and by its own people.  A place where mobile bodies visit, change, leave, settle, return to, reinvent.  It has always been the locus of colonial desires and of capitalist interests.  It has always been an uncanny and familiar place, where the only constant has to be that it refuses the most vehement signification, even when caught up in the throes of nationalist passion.

Perhaps I have invented my familiarity as much as I have myself imagined the Manila landscape.  Perhaps, I too have become one of those transnational bodies; certainly my privileged role has not escaped me.  But as I continue to think and write about tropical temporalities and Filipinas in global landscapes, my daydreams always return to the Philippine familiar: playing marbles on the dirt, dipping sour kamias into a handful of rock salt, mouth already watering from anticipation, riding the jeepney with my head sticking out the window and seeing a row of elbows akimbo, hand on my heart singing "Bayang Magiliw" in my school uniform, playing in the monsoon rain chasing frogs and dipping my feet into salty waters as the Pacific kissed the sand.  These images remain with me always.

I think it's time again to visit home.