The absence of imagination

Filipinos today can be considered as the new diaspora. They are almost everywhere.

A writer for the Arab News once described Saudi Arabia’s dependence on Filipino workers and reflected that should they choose to leave, Arabs could “die a slow death.”

Outside the Philippines, Saudi Arabia employs the largest number of Filipino workers – about 1,019,577 strong. Filipinos also make up around 20 per cent of the world’s seafarers, and 23 per cent of the world’s total number of nurses. More than 9,000 nurses graduate from accredited nursing colleges and institutes in the Philippines and many of them work abroad in countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Singapore.

It is estimated that there are 7.4 million Filipinos working overseas, with 1.5 million in the Middle East and 2 million in the United States. Workers send home more than 6 billion U.S. dollars annually, exactly the amount of money that Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California is asking the U.S. federal government for bailout to keep the state’s cash-strapped government afloat. This money is also what gives life to the administration of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, without which the Philippine economy cannot survive.

Much has been said and written about the Philippine diaspora. A great number of Filipinos have settled in the U.S., Canada and Australia, The United Kingdom is also becoming another country of choice for Filipino immigrants. All these countries appear to be the best destinations for Filipinos abroad, where English is the dominant language.

Filipinos in the United States have long established themselves as an economic and political community. Second- and third-generation Filipinos and children from intermarriage between Filipinos and Americans have integrated deeply into the American social fabric. They have done well in the fields of education, arts and literature, medicine and sciences, and in the public service either as elected officials or professional civil servants.

We have not achieved that kind and quality of integration in Canadian society like our Filipino-American cousins. Partly because we are recent newcomers in Canada; the first wave of immigration started in the early 1970s. Perhaps, this is also due to the quality of our immigrants, the best among us either stayed home or left for the United States. There are a few who are well-educated and intellectually equipped to take the leadership in promoting our national group but they seemed to have been outnumbered and out-led by the more aggressive and fame-seeking ones in our community.

Either we have accepted our lower status in the larger Canadian society by default or allowed the thirst for power, prestige and fame of those who are able to manipulate and exploit the weaknesses of the Filipino psyche to dominate our aspiration for a better and loftier place in our culturally diverse community.

Just take a survey of the leadership and the purposes of organizations in our community and it would not be surprising to find that these are determined by their local origin in the Philippines and the insatiable drive to satisfy our penchant for beauty contests, parades, annual dance galas, singing competitions, and for Hawaiian hula which is not even part of our cultural heritage. Filipinos in Toronto love to showcase our cultural heritage without understanding its historical and social significance, as if audience reaction were the only important metre and not the meaning or relevance of the performance.

Let’s take the University of the Philippines Alumni Association (UPAA) in Toronto, for instance. Founded a hundred years ago, the University of the Philippines (UP) is the country’s premier educational institution. It has produced most of the country’s national leaders after the American occupation. Thus, it is only natural to have very high expectations of UP graduates.

Thirty years ago, UPAA started with a bang with Halinhinan, an evening of Philippine dance, music and fashion. At that time, it was a very big cultural event. No Filipino group in Toronto had yet brought to town cultural fare of this magnitude. That was before Harbourfront became synonymous with Filipino festivals. The next year came Walang Sugat, a zarzuela by Severino Reyes, whose staging made Filipinos in Toronto proud of their heritage. Then the cherubic voices of the U.P. Mixed Chorus regaled the town. During the dying years of the Marcos dictatorship, some UPAA Toronto members joined the swelling protest movement in North America. When our young children fell prey to insidious discrimination and harassment at the Scarborough Town Centre, some of our members were in the vanguard of the boycott of the shopping mall and the protest against racism.

Today, UPAA Toronto is hardly a shade of what it was. The organization seems to have hibernated to the safety of a monthly coffee klatch and the annual ball, impervious to the social justice and labour issues that other organizations have taken a lead. Although it has grown in membership, its agenda seems to have thinned down to participating in the inter-alumni summer sports fest or the occasional fundraiser. In short, it has opted to shy away from the road less travelled, and of late has shown signs of succumbing to AOI, i.e., the absence of imagination.

Why is imagination so important?

Albert Einstein once said "Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we know and understand while imagination embraces the entire world and all there ever will be to know and understand."

Imagination makes it possible for us to experience a whole world inside the mind. A developed and strong imagination does not make one a daydreamer or impractical. On the contrary, it strengthens our creative abilities, and it is a great tool for recreating and remodelling our world and life.

Why is there this absence of imagination?

Well, human beings are like most objects: we choose the path of least resistance. It takes less energy to watch television than to read a book. Sometimes the unimaginative can become dangerous; the unimaginative may also become a deadweight.

What to do? Let us all harness our imagination to the fullest, not be bogged down by the easiest and simplest tasks, but to be challenged to do things beyond our capabilities, to reach for the infinite, for our imagination is limitless.

The passing scene

Today, October 1, I ran out of ideas to write.

Not that there is nothing interesting happening around town worth commenting about. News of the U.S. financial crisis and the rejection by Congress of the $700 billion bailout by the Bush government has been on television and radio since Monday at about 2:00 p.m., and CNN continues to air opinions from economists, politicians and the spin-makers from both major American political parties nonstop, explaining to the public who’s to blame for the failure of the U.S. Congress to pass the rescue package that aims to stop the bleeding in the stock market.

There are more well-informed blogs on this subject, and I would encourage my readers to go to these blogs instead, but if they are still interested in what I usually spew out on this site, then bear and stick with me as I comb through some not-so-important matters in the life of my own community in Toronto.

Someone from my alumni chat group recently raised his concern about a proposed bill in Philippine Congress that seeks to tighten the existing law on obscenity and pornography in the Philippines. He was particularly worried that the proposed law might lead to possible censorship of art that explores nudity. He thought of the Oblation, a statue of an almost completely naked man with arms stretched to the skies in front of the administration building of the University of the Philippines, a figure which becomes visible as one enters the university grounds.

As a young freshman, I thought the statue was just a welcome sign but it really meant more than that. This fellow alumnus fears that an art book of nude studies by well-known artists, a book launched during the school’s centennial celebration, would be censored under this law. How horrible it would be if the proposed law would declare the Oblation and the art book obscene, and therefore banned, he mused.

If he were a lawyer, he would have understood that the proposed law was not meant for censorship. But he is an artist, therefore his concern is valid because censorship has a genuine chilling effect on any artist.

Before sharing his indignation, he and his group of Filipino artists had a sketching session during our alumni association's monthly breakfast social gathering. A model was invited, perhaps hired is the better term, to pose while interested onlookers watched the artists sketch. It was set up like a performance art show similar to a spoken word artist or poet reading before an audience. After they finished sketching, the artists displayed their works and some of the sketches were either sold or bought.

This sudden interest in nudity as an art form from a group of people, with the exception of a few, who have not shown any proclivity towards the arts in the past is somewhat very disturbing, if a bit unsettling. If the organizers of the breakfast meeting were simply motivated in raising attendance or perking the enthusiasm of those who regularly attend, then that is fine and well-intentioned, even if a nude sketching session might have turned some people into accidental voyeurs. And if this interest in nudity is reinforced by making it a regular feature of future breakfast meetings, then voyeurism masquerading as art appreciation has indeed been aroused to a greater extent particularly among the older men.

Nude sketching is common to artists, particularly those who are just starting or are novice artists. But art appreciation is something else, and one does not need to be exposed to nudes or to watch artists draw nude models to really value or understand what good art is.

The most practical way is to see the works of the masters through books or the Internet or by visiting museums. I have visited many art museums, among them the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York, the art museums in Atlanta, Dallas, Denver, Philadelphia and San Francisco, as well as our art museums in Toronto, but I have yet to see a significant number of nude paintings on display. Because artists, when they become really good in their art, would usually set aside their nude studies and sketches (part of their preparation as artists is to study the forms and shapes of the human body) to tackle the real world: draw from their life experiences, or their impressions about landscapes, or inanimate or still life objects, or social issues.

Picasso’s nudes were mostly sketched during his Blue Period, in the early part of his career as a painter.

The Coit Tower in San Francisco, for instance, is a virtual art display of the Depression Years in the United States, featuring in detail of how life during those years had been difficult for everyone. (Mural at Coit Tower, San Francisco. Photo by Alitaptap.)

The same could be said of the San Francisco Institute of Art: no nude paintings or photographs, but works interpreting man’s struggle to live (as in Diego Rivera’s mural of industrial workers) or of the joy and beauty of life.

Nudity in art is well and good, but there are other more serious and socially relevant subjects in the works of artists that can pique our interest. If our aim is more than mere appreciation, but to promote the work of our own artists, then let us do so.

We can start with our young Filipino artists, who at this time in their lives, are struggling to establish their identity in an adopted and foreign society like Toronto, and at the same time searching for their heritage, of who their ancestors are and what it is like to be a Filipino. These are the artists we must encourage and invest on for they are the ones who have the potential to leave a lasting legacy in the art world, not only in our own community, but beyond our national group.

If you don’t have the time to visit the yearly art exhibitions in Nathan Phillips Square, the Riverdale Farm in Cabbagetown or other public art displays and scour the various paintings, sculptures and photographs to find one or two Filipino artists represented, you may visit Kapisanan Philippine Centre for Arts and Culture, 167 Augusta Avenue, home of young Filipino artists in Kensington market downtown Toronto. Or you may simply check their website at http://kapisanan.wordpress.com.