The start of a new revolution
MANILA, Philippines - White represents purity, truth, innocence, the sacred and the divine. White is also the favorite template of TV ads for laundry soaps and metathione products that bombard our senses every day. White is on the cover of a strange 1968 album by a band called The Beatles— you may have heard of them. In Chinese tradition, white is the color of mourning. What tragedy it is we are grieving over by wearing white shirts we are no longer sure. Maybe because there are just too many things to lament. Maybe it’s the fact that Tado Jimenez did not even bother to shave for this shoot. His unhappiness is manifest. Purity is also not the exact word to describe these faces, some of which are about as innocent as a police lineup.
White is not the absence of hue. Sometimes white can also be the color of fear, cowardice, surrender. White is also the color of doubt. It is also said that white is the color that a flame takes on during extremely high temperatures. It is difficult to verify the degrees of heat of the flames that swallowed those gigantic GMA effigies in that SONA rally along Commonwealth Avenue.What we do understand is the intensity of the fury that drove all those students and protesters to the streets.
Strange day, that was. July 27 — it may be too late or futile to express what has already been said and written in countless television shows and newspapers. White can also be the color of a specific kind of lie. But a wise man once said that a lie told often enough becomes the truth. He also happened to be the chief propagandist of the Nazi Party. He was also the same man who said that without the loudspeaker they would not have been able to conquer the world. A lie does not even have to be an outright stating of an untruth. A lie might also happen in the absence of clarity, what remains unsaid at a time when a explicit statement is needed. “I have never expressed a desire to extend my term,” is clever wordsmithing. Sometimes malicious intentions need no overt declarations, especially when one was blatanly lied to in the past. A lie also happens when a congressional spouse — while proudly turning and twirling red-carpet style for the TV news cameras — refuses to divulge the cost of her fancy designer gown.
Even the weather had its own damp commentary on that day — while overcast, it had been a relatively calm day, but half an hour before the speech began, the rain pounded furiously, as if on cue. And the sky was the best critic of all — of an oration best remembered for its snappy, zinging putdowns instead of lasting legacies of statesmanship. Instead of honest assessments of challenges and accomplishments, it paints a hallucinatory fantasyland where no child goes hungry and naked and no activist gets killed by masked men who are definitely not military operatives. White is the color of an empty plate. In ancient China, white was also often associated with treachery, death, autumn, and age.
White is the color of absurdity. In the post-Sona universe, stranger things happen. Four days after the address, Carlo J. Caparas is named National Artist for Visual Arts and Film. The president of the Philippine Republic confers with the leader of the free world, who praises her for bringing progress to the Philippines and upholding human rights. And maybe Melissa Roxas is a member of the New People’s Army, whose flag is not white but predominantly red. When not smeared in mud and dirt during excavation, white is the color of bone.
White is the color of light — specifically that kind of light or “liuanag” (liwanag) that filled the vision of the early religious revolutionaries of the Tagalog south at the turn of the century and beyond — from the Apolinario dela Cruzes to the Valentin delos Santoses. Conventional history may have dismissed them as cranks, lunatics seized by a messianic complex, but they have proven that a truly native, indigenous form of social resistance is possible if given a folk spiritual dimension. Perhaps from them our revolutionaries can learn, not merely from the western paradigms of warfare.
We are similarly unsure if white is the color of nobility. Perhaps it is. But if might be difficult to find the spirit of grace and decency in these times. White is the color of a blank canvas, a blank piece of paper on which all things are possible, soon to give birth to landscapes, characters, worlds both real and imagined, rhythms and images. Perhaps in this day and age, art can still be one of the few sources of nobility. Never mind if the heavy, ugly hand of government still manages to manifest itself even in terms of defining for the national consciousness what is art and what is not. If the head of state can allegedly influence the members of the aptly named Lower House to tinker around with the Constitution, then surely it can name anyone National Artist. It is indicative of government’s regard for art: not as a sacred, creative endeavor but a matter of executive whim, like a customs bureau or a small-town accounting department.
But while white is the shade of gunpowder, white is also the color of the dove. You can say it’s the symbol of hope. To repeat: white is the color of the empty page. Tabula rasa. White is the perfect canvas. Let’s start all over again.
