I wrote this piece for my performance at Kultura’s Paniniwala: Acts of Faith at the Art Gallery of Ontario on October 5, 2022. In response to the AGO’s exhibit Faith and Fortune: Art Across the Global Spanish Empire, Kultura invited audiences to witness Paniniwala: Acts of Faith, a transcendent experience of live music, storytelling, and dance that challenges colonial legacies of conquest, domination, and Catholicism through Filipino-Canadian artistic expression.
Kultura is an arts and culture festival celebrating innovative artistic expressions and explorations of the Filipino-Canadian identity through live performance, food, music, visual art, and dance. Kultura is proudly presented by Kapisanan Philippine Centre for Arts & Culture–a multiple award-winning grassroots organization dedicated to supporting the professional and artistic growth of Filipinx/Filipino youth through meaningful arts engagement.
“I believe that everything happens for a reason. And that reason is colonization.”
Did you know that The Philippines is named after King Philip II of Spain? The Spanish explorer Ruy López de Villalobos named the islands of Leyte and Samar "Felipinas" during his expedition in 1542. You’re standing here today in these beautiful halls of the Art Gallery of Ontario taking in the “sumptuous and inspiring” visual culture of the Spanish Empire...and something tells me that you do know a bit about this history.
But tell me – did you know that most Filipinos actually struggle to pronounce the “ph” sound? Did you know that none of the languages of our archipelago include this fricative sound?
What sick joke that our colonizers would give us a name that we can’t even pronounce?
IT’S MORE FUN IN THE PHILIPPINES. Our tourism board loves to boast. But as most Filipinos would say, IT’S MORE PUN IN DA PILIPINES!
No, we are not Filipino. We are PILIPINO.
POP QUIZ: Which country in the world has been colonized for the longest?
Oh, I know this. It must be India – the Jewel in the Crown that was the British Empire…right?
EHHHHHHHN WRONG.
Google slaps me in the face. It’s da PILIPINES!
333 years of colonization by the Spaniards, only to be sold to the US for $20 million in 1898. Our “allies”, the Americans, did us dirty working with the Spaniards to orchestrate the Mock Battle in Manila, a whole fake ass battle to distract our revolutionaries while these two western powers secretly transferred control of our capital.
And so began another 48 years of colonial rule – this time under Uncle Sam.
I share this piece of trivia with Marie when we talked about my performance slot here tonight, but she calls me out and challenges me: Justine, is it really only 333 years? Is it really only 48 years? When does colonization really end? Because look at us now.
The impacts of colonization continue to seep deeply not only into our institutions and our systems, into the very name we call ourselves, but buried deep in the recesses of our minds, lodged deep into our psyche.
I listen to Althea Balmes on the audio guide for the exhibit that brings us all here tonight and she reminds me that what we now know as the Philippines is an archipelago of over 7,600 islands with over 110 ethnolinguistic groups, many of which are Indigenous. She reminds me, reminds all of us that there are empires and civilizations that came long before the Spanish that influenced and shaped our land and our people.
Althea challenges me to think of my own identity beyond what these oppressive systems tell me I am. She speaks to me through my headphones saying:
“To think about Filipinos is not to see us as a homogenized group of people but a multiracial group. There is an inherent erasure of ancestral connections when we only strongly identify with the nation-state.”
My mother is from Aklan, my father from Cebu.
My ancestral lineage lies in the islands of the Visayas.
We are Aklanon, we are Cebuano.
But I can’t tell you what that means.
My history’s so fragmented I don’t know my heritage beyond the nation-state, can’t imagine who I am beyond what my oppressors tell me I am.
I am Filipino. I am PILIPINO. I am a name our people can’t even pronounce.
After World War I, Freud wrote an essay called “Mourning and Melancholia”. In it he described mourning as the grief of losing someone or something we know and love. Melancholia involves a kind of grieving, too, only we can’t identify what it is we’ve lost. And so we mourn forever. Always in search of that thing we’ve lost
Fast forward eighty or so years later, David Eng and Shinhee Han, coined the concept of racial melancholia – an ongoing and never-ending mourning as it relates to our identity. They wrote in the context of the diaspora – of the displacement and dislocation that immigration thrusts upon us. Our migration leading to the loss of our culture, of our language, of our heritage. A disconnection from our lineage.
But turns out, you don’t even need to move to foreign lands to lose a part of yourself, to be so far removed you don’t even know what you’ve lost.
Colonization will do it for you, right on your ancestral home.
And yet the spirits of my ancestors – whose exact names, histories, and language I may not know, I may never know – their spirits run through my veins here tonight. Their fierce powers of resistance live on in me today, bringing me right here right now in these halls of grandeur to question it all, to challenge it all, to take control of our narrative and write our living history for future descendants.
Colonization and imperialism. Corrupt, exploitative, and dictatorial governments. Historical revisionism and the impending threat of history repeating itself.