Finger Exercises: After The Monsoon

Finger Exercise: After the Monsoon

Instead of celebrating the resiliency of the Filipinos under these circumstances: near death experiences with the sudden surge of the water, landslide, and debris from the top of the mountains toppling down government housing located at the foot of the mountains—what is needed is a critique that shatters our illusion—a virtual imagination that hides us from a national reality that makes us quiver, shiver, and stutter at its horror, at its despicable real.

People braving the roads that turned into a river at the height of the monsoon rainfall.

Like any other victim, in the wake of the thunder, and torrential downpour—propped with thick wool blankets, a bowl of warm soup, and a freshly brewed coffee—everything at the beginning seem to be under control. The comforts and possibilities of a bourgeois mode of living were available—teetering on the scent of coffee, flipping a few pages of a well-written novel, and navigating the cyberspace in between. Yet, as the storm surges, blows its strong wind, and let the gush of water streams down, one begins to get interested, takes a critical stance by checking the news, asks the current conditions of everyone, and perpetually peers through the windows to cite the growing patches of water around. A kind of sensitivity—an affect that elicits a political gesture—manifests in the way one monitors the ecological atmosphere, until, as the observant becomes the same as those other people—the one who observes becomes eventually the victim.

In a few hours, after watching the news, surveying the expanse of metropolitan manila, the observer comes into conclusion that the water is about to devour the entire city—will turn the roads into rivers, garages into ponds, and the living rooms into foot basins. As the water crawls up to shanties, to ridges of the creeks, to the gutters of the super hi-ways, the monsoon rain is about to burry thousands of lives of people who have nothing: workers who live in make-shift cartons beside the rivers of Pasig, or creeks of Roxas, Quezon City; peasants who strained their backs for four months, and this mass population who live less than half-a-dollar a day. Nameless faces will swim for their lives in the endless wave of water, find a dry surface, and cudgel a tiny sense of hope in those canned goods, politicians sporting their political ambitions, and NGOs making charity a well-remunerated business.

And true enough, after several episodes of drama between the sky, and land, between the friction of lightning and thunder, the earth caved in, and opened itself as a basin of the madness that stormed our nation, our city, and our people. The flood was nothing but a gesture of the insurrectionary force of world that started to heave long before from the catastrophe man has wreaked against the mother land’s body: mining that exhausted its ground for its minerals; illegal logging that deforested its mountains; and big-shot corporations that poisoned water sources, land, and wind. The flood could also be the outcry of this life-world from the ballast of force we brought against this ecosystem that has been protective, and yet giving to mankind. The observer becomes the victim as he sees the water burgeoning its possible wrath—the flood bids its coming.

Manila naturally flooded in the early parts of Spanish Colonial Government

They said that Manila is historically flooded; it is a city that dwells in water, in the swelling that teems from Manila Bay’s navel. It is part of this city’s tragic history. However, how many lives are forgotten, buried under the piles of archival documents that simply persist on a history that decimates the value of the lives of the common? It is an archive that never gave importance to these street vendors, workers, urban poor, or women gestating in the factory of babies of shanties beside the river. Much so, such account of Manila’s past is another version of history, a state’s version of history—to forget the common people, to forget lives that are also drowned by the same flood that drowns our stories.

This flood is a historical experience not of Filipinos resiliency, and persistence to live in this disaster. The smiles of the people being rescued, or captured by these cameramen of mainstream media corporations, are nothing but a warm gesture of acceptance—that the state of things is futile, and subordination to this romance that everyone is made to be enthralled. There might be a thousand of people helping to rescue and save lives, but until when? It is not those warm hands that wash away those fears. It is the charity that congeals us in this spectacle that things will be fine but eventually we know at the back of our minds that the world is rumbling, and the beast is about to make a strike.

Our fates are not some divinely made. Our fates rest on a history that has to be changed. Our state has been perpetually under a state of calamity.

Our country in a perpetual calamity.