Pinoy identity: The fish-eye view

Luis H. Francia may be said to be the quintessential Pinoy-Am. Migrating to New York in his 20s, and steadily "making it" there so that now he can make it anywhere, Luis or Luigi as we once called him has turned into a virtual citizen of the world. Well, make that specifically the U.S. and the land of his birth, good ol’ RP, where he repairs to now and then.

Occasionally he also gets to enjoy a writing grant elsewhere, such as his latest colony stint at Fundacion Valparaiso in Spain. Other destinations are reached via journalistic assignment, as when he interviewed Aung San Suu Kyi at her home in Kampuchea.

It helps to be a writer-editor in the longtime employ of The Village Voice. Francia also does work for Fodor’s, the travel guide publication, contributes as well to Asiaweek magazine and, of late, the Sunday Inquirer Magazine with a monthly column.

But what works best for the peripatetic journalist, essayist and xenagogue is his early training as a poet. Both his heart and mind’s eye ever trawl the seas of human relations for pearls of experience, tune in to ironies of inscape, celebrate the quiet insight with a wry regard that doesn’t quite betray which side of the political correctness fence he’s on.

A Palanca prize winner for poetry (in the mid-70s), Francia has a collection titled The Arctic Archipelago and Other Poems. In the mid-90s he edited Brown River, White Ocean: Twentieth-Century Philippine Literature in English, a landmark anthology published by Rutgers University, and co-edited the poetry anthology Flippin’: Filipinos on America with Eric Gamalinda.

An exemplary essay he wrote in the 70s, "Memories of Overdevelopment," has been acknowledged as a classic. Francia could only owe it to himself to place it in context together with other writings he compiled while paying his dues in the Big Apple – not too many of whose denizens were aware that here was a prince in disguise, biding his time while collecting, and eventually recollecting, everything with a built-in fish-eye lens that made each scene, each series of anecdotes and apocrypha, all of a bulging world.

The result was Memories of Overdevelopment: Reviews and Essays of Two Decades, published by Anvil in 1999, and which we’ve reviewed positively in this space.

Now he comes up with a major memoir titled Eye of the Fish: A Personal Archipelago, published by Kaya Press (Post Office Box 7492, New York, NY 10116, or www.kaya.com).

All of 384 pages, Francia’s extended essay is as much self-interpellation as spirited travelogue on his genesis as an evolving citizen straddling the insatiable chasms between Third World and First World.

"Now my recollections are as much elegy as anything else, not just for the city but for my childhood." writes Francia. "Yet in the heart there is that place forever sacred, that child who refuses to die, immune fom the mutability of time and even place, a place finally beyond place. Out of love, and even out of self-preservation, I hold my Manila in its niche, in my own peculiar history, a city no less tangible than that encountered in the real world, a Manila also of the imagination."

Francia is Manileño, Filipino, indio, mestizo, New Yorker, and simultaneously a netizen with his fingers in many pies of coverage, documentation and reverie.

So quintessential is Luis Francia as a Pinoy-Am that premier artist Bencab once had him pose for part of his "Larawan" series on Filipino expatriates. That experience is included in this book, with Francia offering a detailed remembrance of his conversations with Bencab in New York, as well as a credible proposition on how Filipino creativity often goes the long route before finding its wellsprings at home.

"Bencab is illustrative of the Filipino artist who had once looked to and lived in the bosom of the West, secure in the belief that he was where he should be, only to find out that the journey West was really a journey East.

"…In London, Bencab quickly realized that if he followed what was current in Western art, he would always be a second-rate artist, since the impulse for such art didn’t come from within, wasn’t part of his skin. He started to go over his collection of Filipiniana that he had slowly built up over the years, a lot of it from colonial-era texts written by the English and the Americans. He thought, ‘How come Japanese prints from the Edo period, works that were uniquely Japanese, came to be appreciated? There was a conscientious shift in me, to look for Filipino material.’

"…That was the beginning of a whole series of noncommissioned series of Filipinos in the diaspora. (I was the subject for one. Titled Greencard Holder, it shows me standing in the Soho kitchen of my old cold-water flat, bathtub in the background.) Since then, Bencab has been fascinated with what he terms ‘very Filipino gestures’ expressed in such emotions as gratitude and jealousy. He talked about how traditional Cordilleran art, especially its scupltural aspects, had influenced him. The figures inhabiting Bencab’s canvases are indeed sculptural, exhibiting distinctly Cordilleran features – broad faces, rounded limbs and torsos, heavy feet."

The Cordillera is a familar haunt for Francia – from his friendship with and support for the members of the Baguio Arts Guild to his visits to Sagada to commune with Scottie (the scholar William Henry Scott who has since left us bereft), then vice mayor (and now town mayor) Tom Killip, and "the gods behind the gongs."

Some parts of this book have seen earlier publication as travel accounts and personal essays, or have been collected in anthologies, so that we are quite familiar with the neo-tribal characters Luis Francia has connected with, as well the archipelagic strands of memory he weaves through. But here they are all made seamless, the way he has stitched them up as parts of an ecosystem of grand recall.

Essentially, Francia remembers as avidly as he questions his playback of/on Filipino identity. The book begins with a rhetorical litany of wonderment on his portage thus far, from pragmatic adventurer to imaginative romantic. It isn’t so much the mystery of the ego as the dubiously mythic progress of the 20th-to-21st-century Pinoy that seriously concerns the re-collector.

"If this archipelago could comment on my existence, what would it say? What memories, if any, would it have of my passage? Did mountain talk to plain, and plain whisper to sky that bore me away, to ocean that separates me from these islands? Did Manhattan’s bedrock pick up, through riverine delta, through tremor, news of an Asian walking its grounds? Did it decipher in an islander’s footfall and read in a Spanish name a tangled history of blood and bone and spirit? Imagination, trace if you can this landscape’s ineffable power, its sources of joy and sorrow."

But the book is not all poetic reflection. Francia takes us through a journey of discovery on both levels: that of progressive self-recognition, as well as that of actual rites of passage involving all our old familiar ghosts and icons, bogeys and bully boys, duendes and diwatas.

He goes back to early family life in Manila, traces his boyhood through a distinctive Catholic education, revels in the unforgettable instances of youthful wilding.

He reconstructs a night out with the boys, one of whom is José and whom we recognize as Pete Lacaba, in the company of an older writer he masks as "Q." – and whom we also know, for we might even have been part of the scene, unless ours was a reprise. They/we are taken to a toro or live show off the Roxas Blvd. strip of our erotically memorious youth. Francia describes and reflects on the episode:

"The wretched ease of their lovemaking was saved from mechanicalness by his strained eagerness and her gentle cheerfulness. In the end, they reverted to the missionary position (how Catholic, I thought) and, as in fighting-fish flicks, he climaxed on her belly. I remember his mute but eloquent orgasm, but I don’t remember hers, or if she had come at all. More likely, she didn’t. In a reversal of everyday macho etiquette, men came first in bed, and women rarely followed, the onanistic showiness meant to show us that there was nothing fake to this lovemaking, though there may have been no love to begin with."

Flashback to his Jesuit mentors and the Ateneo, where "My friends and I served Mass not so much out of intense religious feelings but for the opportunity of seeing the lovely colegialas who lived nearby, or whose families chose to attend services at the chapel.

"…The best chance of seeing them up close was during communion... There they were, the innocent, unblemished faces of girl-women, eyes half-closed, hands folded, heads slightly tilted. The only incongruous aspect of this meekly chaste portrait was the tongue – that thick, fleshy red organ that could run from speech to unencumbered passion, praise the Lord or lick the most intimate recesses of the body – that each communicant would stick out at the last moment as though mocking us before chewing Christ to a pulp."

From casa to colegialas, then, Francia is enamored of his roots, and seeks again and again, not so much to relive the past, but to add to that storehouse of breath – systole/diastole = sanity/zaniness – that is the native’s birthright.

And so he comes back from Manhattanite exile and breathes the full Pinoy life again – from Vigan to Camalig, NPA zone to (then) Capt. Rex Robles’ own outpost of exile in Zamboanga – making all the right stops and breaking bread with all the right fellow-poets/artists, priests, shamans and wizards.

Hail, hail, the gang’s all here! Santi Bose, Kidlat Tahimik and Robert Villanueva in Baguio. Jaime de Guzman in Banahaw. Resil Mojares in Cebu City. Clovis Nazareno and Lina Sagaral Reyes in Bohol. Fr. Eleuterio Tropa and his Natural History and Science Museum aka Spaceship 2000 in old Dumaguete.

Siquijor and its convents, caves, pythons, Jesse in trance with his dancing dolls, the lore on Imelda’s bout with fish scales. Davao City’s "Nicar-Agdao," Aida Rivera Ford and Tita Lacambra Ayala.

Luis reminisces on his immersion jaunts with Eman Lacaba, details the account of the poet-martyr’s death. He is present at Manila Hotel when a coup is staged to benefit the old pol Arturo Tolentino. He travels to Iligan and Marawi for a first-hand look at the MNLF and Abu Sayyaf. He posits: "The Sayyaf kidnappers are no different from those in Manila who, capitalist to the core, work purely for profit."

He engages in conversation and streetlife in Jolo, Siasi and Bongao, where an informant "echoes a universal complaint about immigrants, sounded as much in Bongao as in New York: nomad, alien, other, threat, harbinger only of malaise."

From Puerto Princesa, St. Paul Park & Subterranean River and the Vietnamese camp in Palawan, Francia flies north to Basco, Batanes, where he is asked again: "Where are you from? Where are you going?" – before he finally communes anew with the spirit of his Lolo Henry.

It is an itinerant’s epic song of sirens and swains, blood and bloodlines, evolving identity, of contemporary history that is made even more bittersweet since we and all our friends and way-station acquaintances are at the center of its continuing flux.

We commend this book – no simple traveller’s tales – and its author’s protean text: "The appeal of fluid identity stems in part from the notion that in each person resides an abiding mystery, one that resists – and resents – attempts to be fixed, butterfly-like, on a pin."