Lost 5
(PREVIOUSLY from Lost 4) ...Designed by a Swiss sculptor and cast in Switzerland, the Filipino patriot’s bronze statue faces the sea as if signifying how we Filipinos at times see ourselves: imagined by others from elsewhere, our image attesting to our colonized past. Luneta is a place of recreation and apart from leisure and relaxation, this can also mean a place to acknowledge how Filipinos have been fabricated and reshaped by centuries of imperial landings on the shore...
(continued...)
In 1521, Antonio Pigafetta, a thirty-year old Italian cartographer, who paid a large amount of money to join the most pivotal voyage in maritime history, witnessed the killing of the expedition’s Portuguese captain in the Philippine shores of Mactan. That morning, forty-nine of them bravely leapt into thigh-deep waters and met the chilling cries of more than 1,500 armed natives flanking them on both sides and in front. For half an hour, the expedition’s musketeers and crossbow men shot in defense; this in spite of their commander’s desperate order to cease firing. A number of the men managed to reach the shore and burned down more than twenty houses. It was futile: the enraged natives had already hurled themselves on their captain who by then was left with only six of his men. They knocked the plated helmet off his head twice. A bamboo spear was hurled into his face and his arm. An arrow shot through his right leg; a large curved blade wounded his left. He fell face downward, his blood dispersing in the salty waters of his destiny, his final port of call. Pigafetta saw how his dying captain turned many times to look at his men retreating to their boats as the natives put an end to his life, this forty-year old man, Ferdinand Magellan, the first European to reach the Philippines. “They killed our mirror, our light, our comfort, and our true guide,” Pigafetta later wrote in The Story of the First Voyage Around the World.
I availed of Pigafetta’s only surviving account because it is the elegiac voice of a witness, one who, in so many ways, made it back full circle. Like him, I am also a part of everything that has survived Europe’s encroachment in Southeast Asia, which began in the late sixteenth century; although mine attempts to tell the story of a search for a self that is not so much interested in retrieving what was lost; rather, it is the afflicted construction of an evolving postcolonial consciousness that concerns me, one that navigates an ocean of doubt and forgetting, of memory and imagination.
In 2005, Patrick Flores, a Filipino expert in postcolonial art in Southeast Asia, invited me to view an art exhibit he curated for the Philippine’s National Museum. The building, designed in the early 1900s in classical Greek architecture, stood right next to Rizal park. What struck me on the upper floor exhibit was how, in one area, Flores had hanged two artworks separately so that it flanked one of the museum’s windows. One looks outside, he said, and the framed view of the park provided visual continuity between the two artworks. Indeed, the “out there” perspective allows the narrative to liberate itself from the tedium of chronlogy and examine gaping wounds to find the larger story. And looking out, this was what I saw: an imposing monument newly erected on what was once the open space of my memory.
I turned to Patrick and pointed at the towering 30-foot statue. “What is that?” I asked him.
“Lapu-Lapu.”
“Oh.”
“It’s controversial,” Patrick said but did not elaborate.
Lapu-Lapu was the island chieftain who led the killing of the Portuguese navigator Magellan. The statue’s ceremonial unveiling took place exactly 484 years to the day that commemorates the chieftain’s victorious battle. The native vanguard stands looking out to the sea, vigilantly holding his sword in front of him, its tip resting on territorial grounds. Also dubbed as the first Philippine hero, the monument was called “The Statue of the Sentinel of Freedom”.
A month before the historic battle of Mactan, while Magellan’s ships were still anchored in another island, nine natives with their chieftain came on canoes and boarded the captain’s ship. Magellan told the chieftains that they were sent by the King of Spain to spread the Christian faith. The sight of the white man’s sick and starving men probably courted sympathy as much as hearing the unfortunate incident that befell the seafarers more than a week before, when natives from another island stole from their ship and took their small boat. In retaliation, Magellan burned fifty houses and killed seven men from the vilified island. As it turned out, the chieftain and his men were not friends with the people from that island, an admission that permitted leniency towards the unknown visitors. The well-disposed chieftain guided and led the lost men ashore where the voyagers pitched their tents while the natives fed their sick with coconuts and fish. As is often the case in international relations, aid and hospitality were followed by an acknowledgment, a settlement of gratitude with gifts, the first formal exchange of goods between the Philippines and the old world. The natives presented two large jars of rice, a bamboo tube-laden feast of honey, pork, fowls, fruits and eggplants and a gold staff; while the overwhelmed Europeans gave a pearl-colored shawl, a purple hat, woolen shirts, knives from Toledo, mirrors and silver buttons. The natives provided sustenance, the much-needed nourishment that the seafarers lost in paying the tolls of quest and conquest. In return they were given a mirror so they could see the other person their new friends claimed they could become, wearing a shawl, a hat and woolen shirt in the tropics, this new person gleaming with silver knobs and the glinting blade of power. The chieftain brought out a jar of coconut wine and they drank to each other’s health. Here's to sustenance and transformation! Later, after a storm had passed, a tall cross was raised near the shore and a mass was celebrated to honor this friendship between fifty European men who left their armors behind and the tattooed natives with waist-length black hair, who came adorned with gold earring and armlets and kerchief tied around their heads; their daggers, spears and shields glittering with gold ornaments and precious stones. Thus ended the search for a shorter route to the contested island of spices: on tropical shores, the salty breeze breathing life to the liturgical host, raised in memory of Christ’s crucifixion, portentously delivering the fate of an empire’s envoy a month later, from favorable visitor to fatal victim.
We probably will never know the exact reasons why these two landings turned so dramatically different or how one local saw the foreigner as lost while the other as enemy. It would be interesting to know how both native camps felt, that is, if they ever did learn of each other’s conflicting response: how one presented a golden staff while the other brandished a sword. Imagine meeting a person totally different from you. It would make a compelling tale, a smoldering debate that weighs the losses and gains on the risks we have to take when we allow a stranger into our lives or when we refuse them to keep our comfortable and autonomous lives secure. In Magellan’s case, it’s possible that there is no categorical right or wrong deed where one could be regarded as heroic and the other gullible; or one as overly protective and the other magnanimous. It was after all the age of discovery and its terms, in so many ways, are still being mediated to this day. According to Philippine Senator Richard Gordon, Lapu-Lapu’s monument was a gift from the Korean Freedom League, an NGO based in South Korea that rallies for democracy by providing humanitarian aid to the “innocent people” of neighboring communist North Korea. Gordon, a former long-time mayor of a city originally governed by American naval forces, also said that Islamic leaders from the southern island of Mindanao were elated to see the statue at the national park. It’s about time, the Muslim leaders said, that their ancestors were depicted as "heroes" and not as terrorists. One of my favorite TV songs as a child in the Philippines was from Sesame Street, the one where Bob asks, who are the people in your neighborhood? These days, the war on terror and on-going nuclear threats define for us an age when our rapid, technology-driven discoveries of each other’s most guarded differences, vulnerability and resources, have unexpectedly cultivated a global posing of dominion and mutual distrust. Amidst this murky quandary, the question persists: exactly what kind of freedom did Lapu-Lapu fight fiercely to uphold? What was he guarding? For four hundred years, a secret lay sunken in the depths of the Philippine sea.
(to be continued...)
Photos (top to bottom):
1) Philippine Pacfic coast in Dinapigue, Aurora, taken last year
2) Me in Mclean, Virginia, taken by Simon Tobler last summer
3) Studio portrait of me in Chiang Mai, Thailand, taken ten years ago
4) Outstretched wounded hand of the ressurected Christ, a venerated image under the care of Philippine actress Lotlot de Leon; taken last year, the night her sister Matet lost her baby
5) Unknown film from my private collection of movie stills
Links
Lost 1, Lost 2, Lost 3, Lost 4
TECHNORATI tags: lost, philippines, creative nonfiction, filipino, pigafetta, antonio pigafetta, lapu lapu, mactan, circumnavigation, navigation, history, disocvery, magellan, Ferdiannd Magellan, navigator, luneta, memory, rizal park, Portuguese, old world, Richard Gordon, Korean Freedom League
(continued...)
In 1521, Antonio Pigafetta, a thirty-year old Italian cartographer, who paid a large amount of money to join the most pivotal voyage in maritime history, witnessed the killing of the expedition’s Portuguese captain in the Philippine shores of Mactan. That morning, forty-nine of them bravely leapt into thigh-deep waters and met the chilling cries of more than 1,500 armed natives flanking them on both sides and in front. For half an hour, the expedition’s musketeers and crossbow men shot in defense; this in spite of their commander’s desperate order to cease firing. A number of the men managed to reach the shore and burned down more than twenty houses. It was futile: the enraged natives had already hurled themselves on their captain who by then was left with only six of his men. They knocked the plated helmet off his head twice. A bamboo spear was hurled into his face and his arm. An arrow shot through his right leg; a large curved blade wounded his left. He fell face downward, his blood dispersing in the salty waters of his destiny, his final port of call. Pigafetta saw how his dying captain turned many times to look at his men retreating to their boats as the natives put an end to his life, this forty-year old man, Ferdinand Magellan, the first European to reach the Philippines. “They killed our mirror, our light, our comfort, and our true guide,” Pigafetta later wrote in The Story of the First Voyage Around the World.
I availed of Pigafetta’s only surviving account because it is the elegiac voice of a witness, one who, in so many ways, made it back full circle. Like him, I am also a part of everything that has survived Europe’s encroachment in Southeast Asia, which began in the late sixteenth century; although mine attempts to tell the story of a search for a self that is not so much interested in retrieving what was lost; rather, it is the afflicted construction of an evolving postcolonial consciousness that concerns me, one that navigates an ocean of doubt and forgetting, of memory and imagination.
In 2005, Patrick Flores, a Filipino expert in postcolonial art in Southeast Asia, invited me to view an art exhibit he curated for the Philippine’s National Museum. The building, designed in the early 1900s in classical Greek architecture, stood right next to Rizal park. What struck me on the upper floor exhibit was how, in one area, Flores had hanged two artworks separately so that it flanked one of the museum’s windows. One looks outside, he said, and the framed view of the park provided visual continuity between the two artworks. Indeed, the “out there” perspective allows the narrative to liberate itself from the tedium of chronlogy and examine gaping wounds to find the larger story. And looking out, this was what I saw: an imposing monument newly erected on what was once the open space of my memory.
I turned to Patrick and pointed at the towering 30-foot statue. “What is that?” I asked him.
“Lapu-Lapu.”
“Oh.”
“It’s controversial,” Patrick said but did not elaborate.
Lapu-Lapu was the island chieftain who led the killing of the Portuguese navigator Magellan. The statue’s ceremonial unveiling took place exactly 484 years to the day that commemorates the chieftain’s victorious battle. The native vanguard stands looking out to the sea, vigilantly holding his sword in front of him, its tip resting on territorial grounds. Also dubbed as the first Philippine hero, the monument was called “The Statue of the Sentinel of Freedom”.
A month before the historic battle of Mactan, while Magellan’s ships were still anchored in another island, nine natives with their chieftain came on canoes and boarded the captain’s ship. Magellan told the chieftains that they were sent by the King of Spain to spread the Christian faith. The sight of the white man’s sick and starving men probably courted sympathy as much as hearing the unfortunate incident that befell the seafarers more than a week before, when natives from another island stole from their ship and took their small boat. In retaliation, Magellan burned fifty houses and killed seven men from the vilified island. As it turned out, the chieftain and his men were not friends with the people from that island, an admission that permitted leniency towards the unknown visitors. The well-disposed chieftain guided and led the lost men ashore where the voyagers pitched their tents while the natives fed their sick with coconuts and fish. As is often the case in international relations, aid and hospitality were followed by an acknowledgment, a settlement of gratitude with gifts, the first formal exchange of goods between the Philippines and the old world. The natives presented two large jars of rice, a bamboo tube-laden feast of honey, pork, fowls, fruits and eggplants and a gold staff; while the overwhelmed Europeans gave a pearl-colored shawl, a purple hat, woolen shirts, knives from Toledo, mirrors and silver buttons. The natives provided sustenance, the much-needed nourishment that the seafarers lost in paying the tolls of quest and conquest. In return they were given a mirror so they could see the other person their new friends claimed they could become, wearing a shawl, a hat and woolen shirt in the tropics, this new person gleaming with silver knobs and the glinting blade of power. The chieftain brought out a jar of coconut wine and they drank to each other’s health. Here's to sustenance and transformation! Later, after a storm had passed, a tall cross was raised near the shore and a mass was celebrated to honor this friendship between fifty European men who left their armors behind and the tattooed natives with waist-length black hair, who came adorned with gold earring and armlets and kerchief tied around their heads; their daggers, spears and shields glittering with gold ornaments and precious stones. Thus ended the search for a shorter route to the contested island of spices: on tropical shores, the salty breeze breathing life to the liturgical host, raised in memory of Christ’s crucifixion, portentously delivering the fate of an empire’s envoy a month later, from favorable visitor to fatal victim.
We probably will never know the exact reasons why these two landings turned so dramatically different or how one local saw the foreigner as lost while the other as enemy. It would be interesting to know how both native camps felt, that is, if they ever did learn of each other’s conflicting response: how one presented a golden staff while the other brandished a sword. Imagine meeting a person totally different from you. It would make a compelling tale, a smoldering debate that weighs the losses and gains on the risks we have to take when we allow a stranger into our lives or when we refuse them to keep our comfortable and autonomous lives secure. In Magellan’s case, it’s possible that there is no categorical right or wrong deed where one could be regarded as heroic and the other gullible; or one as overly protective and the other magnanimous. It was after all the age of discovery and its terms, in so many ways, are still being mediated to this day. According to Philippine Senator Richard Gordon, Lapu-Lapu’s monument was a gift from the Korean Freedom League, an NGO based in South Korea that rallies for democracy by providing humanitarian aid to the “innocent people” of neighboring communist North Korea. Gordon, a former long-time mayor of a city originally governed by American naval forces, also said that Islamic leaders from the southern island of Mindanao were elated to see the statue at the national park. It’s about time, the Muslim leaders said, that their ancestors were depicted as "heroes" and not as terrorists. One of my favorite TV songs as a child in the Philippines was from Sesame Street, the one where Bob asks, who are the people in your neighborhood? These days, the war on terror and on-going nuclear threats define for us an age when our rapid, technology-driven discoveries of each other’s most guarded differences, vulnerability and resources, have unexpectedly cultivated a global posing of dominion and mutual distrust. Amidst this murky quandary, the question persists: exactly what kind of freedom did Lapu-Lapu fight fiercely to uphold? What was he guarding? For four hundred years, a secret lay sunken in the depths of the Philippine sea.
(to be continued...)
Photos (top to bottom):
1) Philippine Pacfic coast in Dinapigue, Aurora, taken last year
2) Me in Mclean, Virginia, taken by Simon Tobler last summer
3) Studio portrait of me in Chiang Mai, Thailand, taken ten years ago
4) Outstretched wounded hand of the ressurected Christ, a venerated image under the care of Philippine actress Lotlot de Leon; taken last year, the night her sister Matet lost her baby
5) Unknown film from my private collection of movie stills
Links
Lost 1, Lost 2, Lost 3, Lost 4
TECHNORATI tags: lost, philippines, creative nonfiction, filipino, pigafetta, antonio pigafetta, lapu lapu, mactan, circumnavigation, navigation, history, disocvery, magellan, Ferdiannd Magellan, navigator, luneta, memory, rizal park, Portuguese, old world, Richard Gordon, Korean Freedom League
posted by wilfredo pascual at 6:55 PM
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