| Photo by Jiří Suchý on Unsplash
Second of a three-part series- *A chapter from a memoir, Land of the Mourning by Fernando B. Perfas
The walls and small inlets of Fort Santiago were visible from where we sat. In college, I learned the role Fort Santiago played in the barbaric methods used against prisoners by the Spaniards and later the Japanese. Those inlets regulated the flow of water as sea tides ebbed and flowed into the dungeons under the fort. These dungeons were where prisoners had been left to drown during the Spanish times and later during the Japanese occupation of the country.
Fort Santiago—the brick sentinel that guarded Manila at the mouth of the Pasig River—held secrets of untold atrocities from the past. It was the same prison in which Dr. Jose Rizal had been confined before his execution by a Spanish firing squad in December 1896. Rizal was a great man who possessed an incisive understanding of the long-term consequences of Spanish oppression on the mind and well-being of Filipinos. Before his death, he worked hard to alleviate the yoke of colonialism. He put his thoughts down in two novels, Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo, books that sealed his fate.
“What happened after that?” I asked Tim. My curiosity was now piqued by what he was saying. I listened intently, attempting to absorb with my thirteen-year-old mind what he was trying to explain. Why Tim had narrated this piece of history and his penetrating thoughts to me, I could only guess. He was sowing a seed, teaching me about myself through a process of unraveling my country’s history and our deep connection to it. Although I only have vague recollections of the details of this period, I kept the substance of his ideas with a freshness unassailable by the passage of time. His thoughts percolated in my brain like a seed waiting for its time to break ground and meet the sun.
Tim continued to describe that when the Spaniards subjugated the early Filipinos and colonized the Philippines, several things happened that left indelible marks on the Filipino psyche. Finally, in later years, I have come to understand the significance of the seeds of ideas Tim sowed in my mind. In a leap of insight, I figured, the assault on their minds shaped their adaptation to their new social environment. The gradual evolution of this adaptation process was imprinted into the Filipinos’ DNA and passed on epigenetically to succeeding generations, molding the Filipino character. At this point in his pivotal discourse on the psycho-history of Filipinos, Tim lost me in a maze of complicated ideas that I would only appreciate and grasp in later years. He described how the Spanish tactics of using military force and religious conversion to subdue resistance are closely intertwined assaults on body, mind, and soul. Some of the psychological tactics employed involved erasing the early Filipinos’ sense of identity as a people by destroying their culture and indigenous beliefs. Using various means of oppression, they gradually subjugated the natives.
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They seized choice tracts of land for the colonial masters, including assigning Spanish surnames to Filipinos by region, under Governor General Claveria. Then the Spaniards elevated their own status as the superior race, “the messengers of the Faith,” while demoting the natives to the status of the savage — “Los Indios,” as the Filipinos were called. Therefore, to rebel against the Spanish was to revolt against the Faith, thus inculcating feelings of sin and guilt. “Faith” came with a price. Believing was not enough. The natives had to give up what little they had to appease the Gods and petition for blessings, such as passage to a better place in the afterlife, the guarantee of a good life for a newborn, and practically everything that required good fortune and blessings.
One doctrine that embodied their pervasively superior attitude was called “Limpieza de Sangre”— pure blooded. The doctrine propounded that salvation was only for those with Christian lineage — the white Spaniards. They considered the native’s blood as impure beyond redemption and their souls beyond salvation, even with conversion to the new faith. In principle, it was prejudicial and led to discrimination by the Church against native priests, including the mestizos who were not “pure-blooded” Spaniards and were considered an underclass among priests. The discrimination includes not only skin color, but also bloodline.
The economic, intellectual, and social oppression of native Filipinos was no less severe, as I would later understand. It was in Spain’s interest to keep the Filipinos poor and ignorant of the newly established order.
Revolts by early Filipino patriots grew from complaints of Spanish abuses. They accused the Spanish of enjoying the fruits of their land while making no effort to improve the lot of the masses. Learning was discouraged for fear that the natives would use their knowledge against the colonial power. It was almost a crime to learn Spanish.
Filipinos were forbidden to learn the language for fear it might open their minds to Western ideas and provide them with a language to unite. Instead, the rulers encouraged the natives to speak their own regional dialects, leaving them divided and out of touch with current mainstream Spanish culture. They remained so ignorant that when revolts erupted in one part of the realm, the Spaniards used Filipinos who spoke different dialects from other parts of the country to quell the rebellion, thus pitting Filipino against Filipino. This divisive legacy persists today in Filipinos’ unbounded regionalism. Despite the three hundred and fifty years under its rule, the Philippines became Spain’s only non-Spanish-speaking former colony. Filipinos kept the Faith despite the cruelty and abuses suffered by their forefathers. Furthermore. . .
In 1898 — the twilight of its colonial grip on the Philippines — instead of handing the country to advancing Filipino revolutionaries, Spain surrendered the country to Commodore Dewey’s American naval forces during the Mock Battle of Manila Bay, thus avoiding a humiliating defeat. Their reason: “Filipinos are brutes incapable of governing themselves.” This statement, after three hundred and fifty years of Spanish Christianizing and colonizing the Philippines, defied logic. However, if the statement implied, “After three hundred and fifty years of being brutalized, the Filipinos have been rendered incapable of governing themselves,” then it made perfect sense.
Betrayed once again, the Philippines entered another era of colonial subjugation, this time under the United States. The ensuing brief but bloody American pacification campaign against Filipino resistance culminated in the establishment of American-style political, educational, and socio-cultural institutions. By now, the grip of colonialism on the Filipino psyche was pervasive. To add insult to injury, the brief but brutal Japanese occupation of the Philippines during the Second World War was another assault upon the already overburdened Filipino morale.
The pillaging, killing of men, and raping of women by the occupying forces in the wake of the war moved Filipinos into close ranks with their American “big” brothers, determined to fight and expel the Japanese invaders. Charmed by their more subtle instruments of domination, Filipinos emulated American values and culture. In the end, the political and economic influence America would exert on the Philippines proved powerful and pervasive. While countries like China and Korea, which also suffered occupational brutalities by the Japanese, did not let Japan off the hook so easily for its past cruelties, the Philippines chose to forget and move on.
Today, the Filipino’s pernicious colonial mentality is quite well-known. It disparages anything Filipino, including its own people. When a compatriot hits upon a novel idea and tries to promote it, he’s received with cynical skepticism. “What kind of a scam is he up to this time?” many will say simply because it’s a Filipino idea, regardless of its merits. This mentality will have us look to the West and crave its latest craze, no matter how trivial, so that one can be considered fashionable. This thinking also leads them to despise their own kind when one happens to do better, for it reveals their own vulnerabilities, weaknesses, and inherent insecurities and powerlessness.
Like crabs in a bushel, Filipinos will each push and claw their way to be on top of the rest. This mode of thought considers anything “white” as superior and holds in high esteem the accoutrements of its popular culture. The legacy of the Philippines’ colonial past is etched in the hearts and minds of generations of Filipinos. The tell-tale signs are clear as to how much of their ancestors’ identities, as a people, were completely obliterated and replaced by colonial values and priorities.
“Some of the psychological tactics employed involved erasing the early Filipinos’ sense of identity as a people by destroying their culture and indigenous beliefs. Using various means of oppression, they gradually subjugated the natives.”
Filipinos paid a high price during that dark part of their history and continue to pay. One far-reaching consequence of colonial oppression was the development of a siege mentality in the Filipino psyche. Made powerless by constant threats of overpowering physical force coupled with assaults on their identity, a shrinking source of livelihood, and a bleak future, they evolved fierce adaptive survival strategies that were laced with almost magical elements. They seek to satisfy their physical needs and wants amidst the uncertainties of life with an unfettered drive to accumulate objects. They coveted and hoarded things not only to meet their needs but to fill a hollow in the center of their being, to feed an inner emptiness. To cope with the vagaries and uncertainties of life, they turned to “faith” – to the magical power of prayer, courtesy of the oppressors themselves.
The grievous faults that haunt the Filipinos of today were historically determined and not necessarily inherent in their race. People subjected to long-term oppression will show certain characteristic traits shaped by their means of adaptation. This survival imperative dictates the terms of coping strategies and perhaps has its dent in human nature. The Filipino forefathers’ adverse experiences assaulted the most fundamental principles of survival and the fabric of social consciousness. Like terrorized children made powerless by their tormentors, they emulated the very qualities they abhorred in their oppressors in a perverted quest for the same power they could only dream of having. It’s no small wonder that many grew up confused. What makes Filipinos distinct from others is the unique set of circumstances that have shaped their perceptions of themselves and the conflicted practice of their faith.
Tim said that religion itself is not bad: it is the use of religion as an instrument of exploitation and domination that is wrong. I wonder if the use of “sword” and “cross” to forcibly convert a people of largely pagan and animistic beliefs to a faith with a set of doctrines and dogmas resulted in a shallow assimilation of religious beliefs. The Christian faith has doctrines with socio-cultural subtexts that were new and foreign to the native Filipinos. The natural process of social and psychological assimilation of a new faith would have required the development of understanding through knowledge. However, such an intellectual atmosphere, where discussions and debates could flourish, was starkly missing because universal education was not on the agenda of the Spanish colonizers.
Open discussion and the honest expression of opposing opinions were never allowed, and criticism against the colonial power was tantamount to sedition, punishable by death. Instead, the new religion was taught without regard for cultivating intellect or acquiring tools to ponder new ideas. The natives were forced to swallow the dogmas and doctrines. The threat of dire consequences for refusing such forced beliefs led many to develop an adaptive mechanism centered purely on survival, which has little to do with the flowering of genuine devotion and spiritual sentiments.
This adaptive process, time and again, is not unique to proselytizing religious beliefs but is a result of proselytizing any set of beliefs with a socio-cultural subtext. Often, the end product is a syncretic fusing of indigenous and foreign ideas. A faith without substance, steeped in meaningless rituals, is the child of a misguided adaptation of beliefs and the perverted practice of sacred ideas.
Among Filipinos, Christian ideas and beliefs persisted. For many, however, their original meanings were either lost, adulterated, or misconstrued. Has anyone ever wondered why there are only two Filipino saints and one Beatus (both only recently proclaimed by the Vatican) among the millions of Filipinos who have professed the Christian faith over the centuries? Perhaps there were many saintly Filipinos whose virtues and good deeds remained secret and were never publicized by a self-effacing people. The sword and the cross were the tools used for their conversion, never the compassion and love upon which the Christian faith was founded.
Tim lost me in most of his discourse; however, as I grew older and remembered the ideas he wanted me to understand, I began to grasp their meaning. I was able to piece together fragments from our talks as my understanding of the past broadened. He left my life as casually as he had come into it, but the brief space between his coming and going was like the parting between window curtains that lets in stabs of sunshine. The space grew wider as time passed, the light brightening as the sun rose and traversed the sky. Tim left me with more than a history lesson. He imparted ideas that evolved, with their implications deepening and broadening over time. “Someday you’ll understand much more. You’ll see the meaning of it all,” he said.
One day, years later, I saw Tim’s ideas unfold clearly like a bridge across a chasm. This bridge connected ideas that not only led to an understanding of my country’s widespread poverty but also of the turmoil in the souls of its people, whose roots are buried in the forgotten remnants of my land’s troubled past. His ideas shed light, leading to a new perspective on my own wants and on on some of my psychological tendencies shaped by survival needs.
Tim discouraged me from feeling shame for being poor. He believed that such a sad state was the legacy of our forefathers, who were rendered landless, suffered generations of ignorance and deprivation under the Spaniards. He truly made me feel accepted despite my poverty, and he broadened my self-respect so that someday I could liberate my mind.
As I understood him, generations of Filipinos had lived under a constant “state of siege,” physically and psychologically, under oppressive regimes. Poverty, as well as difficult times and circumstances, are not new to most Filipinos, for in their veins flows the same blood of kin who had endured such states of perpetual siege for generations, a legacy perpetuated to this day.
— TO BE CONTINUED
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Dr. Fernando B. Perfas is an addiction specialist who has written several books and articles on the subject. He currently provides training and consulting services to various government and non-government drug treatment agencies regarding drug treatment and prevention approaches. He can be reached at fbperfas@gmail.com.
