MANILA, Philippines - A year after Yolanda, Tacloban is both an inspiration and a downer, a picture of recovery and unmitigated disaster, perpetually showing signs that things are getting better and yet will never fully recover. One year is a long time to get to the middle, which speaks of the totality of the damage, or the government’s trademark ineptitude, or both. But among the stories of recovery that have surfaced, the one I find most fascinating is the restaurant boom in post-Yolanda Tacloban.
A hundred new restaurants have sprouted in Tacloban this year, with large contingents of foreign aid workers creating a huge demand for places to eat, hang out and kick back after a gruelling and seemingly Sisyphean day of rebuilding. Meanwhile, fewer than a hundred new homes have been built as of last month. While the idea of a thriving foodie scene in Tacloban sounds cute and somewhat encouraging, it’s the sort of news one hopes to be merely indicative of a concretely positive whole. We have plenty of hopes — rebuilt houses, a renewed sense of purpose for Taclobanons, among others — but I’m not sure seeing one of the most devastated areas in modern Philippine history become the new Maginhawa street is necessarily one of them. But I guess normalcy is a lot like Filipinos: it always finds a way.
A year ago today, while Tacloban was being destroyed by Yolanda, we were talking about resilience. Specifically, we were talking about how we’ve all heard enough about resilience. The knee-jerk clichés and memes extolling “the Filipino spirit” just didn’t fly this time. As days went by and the absence of aid became increasingly egregious, the resilience rhetoric began to sound more like an insult: how can the government keep watching Filipinos take it on the chin every single time and do nothing?
ONLY NARRATIVE LEFT
A year later, recovery is the main narrative because it is the only one left. But while the resilience debate sits silently like abandoned debris, it is far from resolved. It can easily be rebuilt when the Next Great National Disaster comes. Despite our best and angered attempts to stop all the talk about resilience, it will never really go away.
In hindsight, resilience has always existed in two disparate spaces: in discourse and in reality. It resides within the context-rich confines of the Internet as rhetoric, while it also exists in a vacuum as fact of life, free of context and mired in the very human instinct to persist. Resilience, by definition, can only occur when there is no one else to rely on. It is, apart from giving up, the only other choice available when the whole world has already crumbled. Taclobanons had no other choice. Historically, Filipinos everywhere are left with no other choice.
The difference between the horror of Yolanda and the mundane inconveniences of our daily life — commuting, accessing public services, and basically every little ripple caused by corruption — is vast, but they are related. We survive our small prosaic disasters because we have no choice. If you are a Filipino living in the Philippines and who has somehow found a way to survive and remain sane, then you are resilient by default.
NATIONWIDE SHAME
But last year, people began disowning that virtue en masse. It became a nationwide shame — or at the very least, an Internet-wide shame. We saw what was happening in Tacloban and aired all our accumulated anger over the Internet, our sacred space of rhetoric where we can safely rebel against the lowered expectations associated with resilience. And because this is the space that is more public and visible, it is the space we like to pretend matters more.
Tacloban, a year later, is a space where all rhetoric ends and reality takes complete hold. It is a space where resilience is still a necessity and not a flaw in logic, where government rebuilding efforts have been few and far between, leaving people to improvise and make do with whatever opportunities are available, like put up a hundred new restaurants simply because it is a viable survival tactic. Now, every time I think about Tacloban, I cannot help but think about all those establishments, bright with their lights and blonde, pale-skinned clientele, an archipelago of vibrancy in an ocean of disrepair. I cannot shake them from my mind because they perfectly demonstrate the persistence of normalcy in Filipino life, because normalcy, with its increasingly downgraded definition, with all the ways we are fed up with it, is all we really have in the end.
* * *
Tweet your reactions to the author @ColonialMental.