Torn and frayed in Manila

The incredible Philippine memory

Soon after I arrived in the Philippines I was comparing notes with another newly arrived European at the UN agency where I worked. We agreed that our local colleagues’ encyclopedic knowledge of the names and details of the rest of the workforce was something we had not encountered elsewhere. Colleagues we had never met seemed to know who we were and which departments we worked in. The databanks that the Filipino staff carried around in their heads were particularly impressive because, not only was the office itself quite large (over 350 employees), it was complemented by a large floating population of consultants who came and went. None of this seemed to faze the sponge-like memory of our Filipino colleagues, who had no apparent difficulty in recalling the name of a visiting consultant whose only previous visit to Manila had been four years previously.

Over the years, I have become a rather desensitized to this remarkable facility and have come to take it for granted, but every once I am reminded of it. For example, we have a coffee stand at my current place of work and girls who work it not only have to remember the names of hundreds of customers but their favourite tipples too. Yet they manage this with no difficulty at all, despite the fact that the names of my Central European colleagues must be totally alien to them.

These days I have decided to spare the rest of you my rather erratic road skills and have employed a driver, who is another walking hard disk. Not only is his knowledge of Manila’s complex road layout note perfect, he can remember our lives better than frayed and I can, pointing out restaurants where we dined three years ago in a long forgotten dinner.

There seem to me to be at least three explanations of Filipinos’ elephantine memories.

First, you remember what is important to you and one of the truisms about Filipinos is that they are very people-oriented.

Second, all the examples I have quoted were all of people remembering details of people higher up the social scale than themselves. Given the quasi-feudal nature of much of Philippine society, perhaps it is not surprising to find Filipinos making it their business to store up information about their “betters”.

Third, perhaps it has something to do with the size of families here? If six siblings each have six kids themselves, each one of those will have 35 first cousins. That’s not a bad start to the databank. (By contrast, my family is incredibly small, even by European standards, and I don’t have a single first cousin.)

Still, those features (people-orientation, quasi-feudalism, and large families) are characteristic of many societies in the developing world and I’ve not met quite such an almost scary level of recall in other countries. So let’s hear it for the Philippine memory—one of the best in the world!

“Soldiers died for you”

I didn’t feel too comfortable when I saw from the front page of yesterday’s paper that the President had told rescued hostage Father Bossi “Did you know soldiers died for you?” I couldn’t quite articulate why I felt this was an inappropriate remark, but fortunately today’s Inquirer editorial does that excellently:

When Bossi recounted his brief conversation with the President, the priest revealed that after congratulating him, the President laid on a guilt trip. “She congratulated me and then she told me that a lot of people died,” he said. Apparently, the guilt trip worked. Referring to the Marines who lost their lives in an ambush during search-and-rescue operations, the priest said, “I think that in a sense, I feel responsible.”

What the President said to Bossi was not only crass, it was unforgivable. It was not only tasteless, it was mean-spirited and obviously further traumatized the priest. It betrayed an emotional coldness, and a transactional attitude that is deserving of the strongest condemnation. Her remark was a national disgrace.
Bossi was the victim. His being kidnapped—and the weeks it took to secure his freedom—can be laid firmly at the doorstep of his captors and the government officials in charge of liberating him. His kidnapping and the ordeal that followed weren’t his fault; whatever efforts and sacrifices were made, by our civilian and military authorities, weren’t in the nature of a favor, but rather, in the line of duty.

That lives were lost by people working for Bossi’s release is a matter for our government to recognize. But it isn’t something for the President of the Philippines to pointedly remind the beneficiary of those efforts, namely Bossi himself, about. The implication of such a reminder is that he owes her, or at least, should be grateful and feel guilty, for something he had a right never to lose: his freedom.

As the editorial points out, the soldiers died less because of Bossi than because of the failings of the government that the president heads.

Shaking Bossi’s hand, congratulating him for being liberated, then reminding him his freedom has come at the price of lives sidestep the reality that Bossi’s liberty and the lives of those Marines were senselessly lost, not because of anything Bossi ever did, but because of the essentially lawless nature of large parts of Mindanao, and our armed forces’ poor command-and-control. Not to mention what is emerging as a scandal involving military munitions. Given all this, the President’s “reminder” also amounted to no less than a contemptible evasion of responsibility.

Chez Sting

It has always depressed me that, of all the great music produced in Britain in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the most well known artist in the Philippines is Sting. I’ve detested him from the outset and the day he and the other bleach blonde poseurs from Police arrived I figured that was the end of punk.

I knew the smug Sting was a bourgeois at heart, so it was heartening to see the vanities and excesses of his household exposed so mercilessly in a court case this week. There’s nothing like an aggrieved domestic servant to open up the nasty side of the family circle, eh?

The rock star Sting and his wife Trudie Styler were ordered to pay their former chef £24,944 yesterday after her “shameful” dismissal when she became pregnant.

Jane Martin, 41, had worked for the 55-year-old singer and his wife for eight years, cooking for stars including Sir Elton John, Bob Geldof and Madonna. The Cordon Bleu chef won a claim of sexual discrimination against the couple after she was unfairly dismissed from her £28,000-a-year job.

… Revealing the lavish lifestyle of the pair, said to be worth £188 million, she told an employment tribunal in Southampton that “opulent extravagance reigned” at their mansion in Wiltshire. She claimed that there was “no regard to expense, cost or wastage” where food and entertaining were concerned at the 300-acre Lake House estate.

On one occasion Mrs Martin restricted caviar at a party to £3,000 worth, but was told by Ms Styler to serve the whole £6,000 stock, much of which was then wasted.
…

She said that, when she announced that she was pregnant in 2005, Ms Styler set about being unpleasant to force her out. She wept as she told the hearing that Ms Styler knew that she had already suffered one miscarriage, but was still required to remain standing for long periods, which sometimes left her doubled up in pain.

She claimed that Ms Styler had said: “Who the f*** does she think she is? She’s my chef in the UK. She needs to be available if I need her, or she should rethink her position.”
…

In an outspoken judgment, the panel castigated Ms Styler for her “shameful conduct” and also for trying to distance herself from the unlawful dismissal by getting “minions” in the family business to “perform her dirty work” during the hearing.

Richard Yates: a neglected American writer

Some months ago a friend asked if I had any book recommendations so I lent him Collected Short Stories and Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. I haven’t seen my friend since, but I understand from frayed that, although he liked the books, he found their bleakness disturbing. He also thought that the fact that I had lent him not one but two of Yates’s books, with a recommendation that they were among my favorites, cast me in a new light. To which I intend to reply when I next see him –there is a reason why “they lived happily ever after” is the last line in the book.

Yates’s version of desolation is always full of unexpected twists, but it is not so much the tightness and originality of his plotting that makes Yates such a unique writer—it is the quality of writing. He has a brilliant ear for dialogue, punctuation, and pace. In the example below for example all Yates really has to do is say is that Sabella, the unpopular new boy in the classroom, comes from a poor part of New York. Yet in doing so he manages in a few deft strokes to paint a whole world for Sabella to inhabit at the end of the school day.

Ordinarily, the fact of someone’s coming from New York might have held a certain prestige, for to most of the children the city was an awesome, adult place that swallowed up their fathers every day, and which they themselves were permitted to visit only rarely, in their best clothes, as a treat. But anyone could see at a glance that Vincent Sabella had nothing whatever to do with skyscrapers. Even if you could ignore his tangled black hair and gray skin, his clothes would have given him away; absurdly new corduroys, absurdly old sneakers and a yellow sweatshirt, much too small, with the shredded remnants of a Mickey Mouse design stamped on its chest. Clearly he was from the part of New York that you had to pass through on the train to Grand Central—the part where people hung bedding over their windowsills and leaned out on it all day in a trance of boredom, and where you got vistas of straight deep streets, one after another, all alike in the clutter of their sidewalks and all swarming with gray boys at play in some desperate kind of ball game.

It all reminds me of that great Tom Waits song “9th and Hennepin”.

no one brings anything small into a bar around here
They all started out with bad directions
And the girl behind the counter has a tattooed tear
"one for every year he's away", she said
Such a crumbling beauty, ah
There's nothing wrong with her that a hundred dollars won't fix
She has that razor sadness that only gets worse
With the clang and the thunder of the southern pacific going by
And the clock ticks out like a dripping faucet
'til you're full of rag water and bitters and blue ruin
And you spill out over the side to anyone who will listen...
And i've seen it all, i've seen it all
Through the yellow windows of the evening train...

If you care anything for the “razor sadness” of life, do pick up some Richard Yates, he won’t disappoint you. I’ll leave you with Kate Atkinson’s judgment:

“Yates is a realist par excellence, the natural heir to Hemingway’s pared-to-the-bones style and the antecedent of Carver’s flat minimalism. Yates has something else though, a kind of transparency, that owes more to Fitzgerald… there is something curiously and quite contrarily uplifting about Yates’s pursuit of honesty. Read and weep.”

See also a previous post on Yates.

The stare

Madame Chiang , who has recently left the Philippines, writes perceptively about the best and worst of the Philippines in two recent posts. Here she is on one national characteristic she will not miss:

The staring

It's not polite and given the number of foreigners that have been in the country, one would think we were not a rarity...granted if I go way out into the provinces...being blonde and rather - how can I put this -'busty'??!!, I can understand that I'll get a few looks...but in the Metro Manila area there is no excuse for the out and out staring that goes on...whilst waiting for a cab, walking down the road, in a mall, wherever...

That’s all true, but if you ain’t walked through Manila with a black person, you ain’t seen nothin’! A friend of mine (a white Brit) is married to a jet black Grenadian. Walking into a Manila restaurant with them was like entering a freeze frame in a movie – forks frozen half way to the mouth, spaghetti dangling, slack jaws, bulging eyes – I think such treatment was significant factor in their deciding that Manila was not for them.

I used to know a Spanish woman here who had only one arm as a result of a birth defect. Complete strangers would often behave dreadfully to her, but after a while she came up with a great riposte. On being told she had only one arm (thanks for that) she would look at her stump with horror and exclaim “Oh my GOD! It was there when I left the house this morning!”

Not being a member of a despised race or disabled or even “busty”, my experience has been less extreme. I am, however, tall – which is, of course, a wonderful trigger for people to run up and stand beside me chortling to their friends at this demonstration of what a freak I am. Come on guys, I’m not even 6’ 2” – I’m not that weird! Being of a fair complexion, I have blonde hair on my arms. Admittedly, this is uncommon in the Philippines, but did that (adult) guy really have to stroke my forearm when I visited Rizal’s birthplace in Calamba?

The bizarre thing is that, as Madame Chiang points out, we are not talking about Papuan cannibals here – the first Europeans arrived in the Philippines in 1521! In other ways, Filipinos are stunningly cosmopolitan, as you might expect from a country one tenth of whose population lives abroad. So what’s with the bug eyes? Well, commenting on Madame Chiang’s post, the amateur misanthrope comes up with a pretty good explanation:

I'm afraid I've done a bit of that myself. Why? Because I can't help but wonder what a white person from the first world would do here. Most of us would rather go out and live elsewhere, you see.

Why we blog

Although George Orwell’s essay “Why I write” pre-dated blogging by over half a century, I haven’t heard a better explanation of why millions of bloggers in all types of societies make the seemingly irrational decision to spend long periods of time in an activity that brings them no financial reward, nor any other type of reward for that matter. Here is George on why people write.

(i) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen — in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all — and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.

(ii) Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations.

(iii) Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

(iv) Political purpose. — Using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

I can’t argue with any of that, but, to show how clever I am, persuade you to quote me in your own blogs, and inspire you to grieve for me after my passing, I can’t resist adding a few items to Orwell’s list, some of which relate specifically to blogging.

(v) Support for another career. Very, very few people make a living from blogging, but quite a few pundits write a blog as a sort of side-bar to a more remunerative activity, such as writing a newspaper column, or appearing as an expert on TV shows. The most prominent local example is Manuel Quezon III, whose blog is a springboard to a host of related activities; columns in the Philippine Daily Inquirer and Arab News, a TV series (the “Explainer”), numerous seminar and conference presentations, and a certain amount of political activity (the Black and White Movement). It would be interesting to know from Manolo where he places his blog in the hierarchy of his many activities; is it a bedrock from which the other streams spring, is it a diversion, or a ball and chain? Howie Severino and Carlos Celdran are other Manila-based bloggers who use their blogs to support and promote their other activities, and why not?

(vi) Satisfying a creative itch. This is close to Orwell’s second reason (aesthetic enthusiasm), but reflects a reaction to an upbringing in which any impulse towards artistic or creative activity has been squashed (which certainly accounts for my education and yours too probably. Not everyone can be a good artist, but everyone has within him or herself a little volcano of creativity. Blogs can open fissures in minds overlain by decades of dull and formulaic education, and tedious and repetitive work, allowing little farts of creative energy.

(vii) Anger. Sometimes the stupidity of the world becomes too much to bear and blogging is one way to kick back. Pinay in Barnsley would fit into this category, I think.

(viii) Connecting with like minded people. It is nice to get comments on a blog, especially from strangers, and to feel that you are not just a lone wolf howling in the wilderness. Some bloggers take this a stage further and, consciously or subconsciously, use their blogs to attract lovers (a well known example is Petite Anglaise, the blog of an English girl in Paris whose romance with a commenter was recorded in detail on her blog).

(ix) Record a deep emotion. In my own case this has usually meant responding to a death, whether of a friend, or of someone who meant a lot to me, such as the suicide of Spalding Gray.

That’s more than enough from me – what about you? Why do you think people lock themselves to their computers for hours to fashion a blog?

John Lydon interview

I can’t tell you how refreshing it was to see John Lydon (neé Johnny Rotten), the old “army of one”, being as difficult as ever in the current Uncut.

The interview starts like this.

What are your memories of the Summer of Punk?

The Summer of Punk? What a meaningless and preposterous term. It sounds like some fool wants to put a compilation album out. I mean it’s all very well and good for you liars in the media. But I intensely dislike that term. It’s emotionally meaningless and historically untrue. An obnoxiously romantic tale on the reality we suffered.

It doesn’t get any better for the interviewer.

There is an argument, postulated by Uncut’s Simon Reynolds, that PiL [Public Image Ltd, Lydon’s band after the Sex Pistols split up] were a more important band than the Pistols. What do you reckon to that?

Whoever Simon Reynolds is he’s wrong. He has no knowledge of what happened back then and he dares to compare one aspect of my life with another. He shoves in his two bob’s worth of self important nonsense and expects me to applaud . Well, I’m sorry, but “No”! For me, the Sex Pistols were my first step in life and they were for countless others too. The Pistols were as important to me as when I fell out of the pram and learnt to walk.

They don’t make ‘em like that any more eh?