Sensing borders and beauties

By Tito Genova Valiente

THE transnational is alive today. Those elements that defy the colors of national boundaries, those transient events that escape cultural categorizations are well around us. Ideologies about merchandising try to smother any signs about countries whose workers produce affluent products, the shelf life of which has to do more with the brand than with the source.

Imagine getting a nice, soft fleece sweater from the heartland of America. You run your fingers on the beige and comfy surface of the textile and dream of a territory that is free from survival problems. But your exercise does not end there: you pull the sweater from inside out and investigate its origin. That act is never part of receiving a gift that is cushiony and, well, imported. But there is that other world in us that has got to know.

So there we are, examining the thing when we should be trying it on first. Our wishes granted, our fears answered, for from the layers of markings we soon discover the secret of this fashion artifact—this clothing that smells of surplus and warm kitchen in soft grays, where dairies and fruits are plentiful—rise hidden the label: Made in the Philippines.

We are amazed, of course; we should be, naturally. We have heard stories like this. They are no urban legends; they are folk tales that are true. We have again proved one fact—that we are, indeed, good manufacturers. World-class, to be sure. It is soon forgotten, however, that the product, while made in our country, indeed, is not really of our country. Our poor workers happen to be just that, workers satisfying the desires and designs of those who sell fashion as if they were selling fate. We are the factory but we are not the world.

This is the tale of globalization.

A world is made smaller or bigger, depending on the lens you use to view developments like globalization. The down blanket that looks like it has been produced in some medieval knitting corners of Eastern Europe turns out to be Made in China. The lamps that grace our streets with their candies-and-crowns designs, inversely, are not inspired from discarded sets of Walt Disney but from, perhaps, Taiwan. Why they look like that is another cautionary tale to be examined.

What is being laid out by this turn of events in design and production is that aesthetics are no more tied to geography than to state that, say, the Mona Lisa is Italian.

The world has grown bigger, indeed, and it is time to claim uniqueness, exotica, or even oddity as the mark of a country that can be best remembered.

How do we sell the Philippines? What trigger in recognition can we tap so that the world can imagine us quickly among the many other countries that have the same wellspring of natural beauties to tap?

We cannot even sit on titles that we used to claim as ours. I have come across brochures of countries declaring that their islands are the pearl of this and that sea. There are nations that are claiming rice terraces and mountains and their perfect cones, the last understandable because certain volcanoes do form lovely, near-perfect cones.

Is it true that there are also countries that have patented flowers like sampaguita and ylang-ylang? I am not surprised at all. A few years back, a t-shirt manufacturer tried to claim patent over the Philippines’s map as design. I have not followed it up but it makes sense: the map that we know to be the composite of our 7,000 islands, give and take the onset and retreat of the tides, does make a good design. True, we live on these islands but the design is something else: it is not God-given and God knows if, indeed, our country looks like that from above.

In transit and in-between two countries and two cultures, the Filipinos from the Philippines (yes, we need this qualification) have to work real hard so they could claim that their act, their end-products, their byproducts are of the Philippines, and uniquely Wow Philippines.

Which brings us back to tourism and slogans. The new tourism campaign and the brickbats and viral responses it gets are coming from the same problem or question, the problem of uniqueness. In a discussion I had with colleagues over late lunch of a late New Year’s party, two of them raised the issue of grammar with regard to the slogans. The claim that “it is more fun in the Philippines” begs a qualifier, a comparison. More fun in the Philippines than in where? If we so claim, we need to present proofs and to do so would incur the ire of other nations who, in the name of tourism, always believe that their country offers more fun than other countries.

We are in a difficult situation now. In the last bastion of our lovely patrimony, we rush to our beaches to claim that they are, indeed, beautiful, and more beautiful than those of our neighboring countries. The cable TV disproves that as we are given images of breathtaking lagoons and coves in Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand.

There is one element left that we are still in control of: the people, the Filipinos. Sadly, they, too, are moving out in droves and proving to be lovelier creatures when displaced as gentle workers and helpers in foreign land.

The author can be reached at titovaliente@yahoo.com