The Weight of Shadows (14 page)

We arrive in Siquijor somewhat intact and are taken to a rural jungle area to meet with a medicine woman. Later, people will tell me there was a long hike, during which we passed a waterfall and took photographs, but I only remember our arrival at this woman's stilt house, which is among a few other structures built in a clearing. It's surrounded by palm trees and thick green vines that seem to be on the brink of reclaiming the space as jungle. A pale yellow hen pecks around the ground, followed closely by her brown chicks. The medicine woman invites us into the main area of her bamboo structure where there is a single chair in the middle of the room. In the various distinct Filipino cosmologies, spirits are not always benevolent. She tells us, through an interpreter, that she is able to sense when someone has been cursed and that she can lift this curse. One of the group's leaders volunteers, and the old woman tells him to sit. He does, and she walks around him several times, running her hands around his body, never making contact. She stops and says he has had a great curse put upon him. She takes a glass of water that had been on her windowsill and brings her face near the back of the cursed man's head. She breathes in deeply and exhales through a straw into the glass of water, which turns black.

Siquijor is as far south as we'll go. Our conspicuous American presence may not be as welcome any farther south. There are several ongoing conflicts between the government of the Philippines and Islamic rebel groups seeking autonomy
from the state on the southern island of Mindanao. When the Spaniards arrived in the sixteenth century, they encountered various distinct ethnolinguistic groups living in their own political and economic formations in the southern part of the archipelago. The Spaniards called all of them Moros because they reminded them of their own Moors, and by the end of the sixteenth century, Spain began sending military expeditions into the Moro Sultanates. Popular folk histories characterize this period as one of consistent and universal resistance to the Spanish crown by Filipino Muslims, but the historical record indicates a more complicated period marked as much by accommodation to colonial power as by violent resistance.

I have a few hours of sustained cognizance in the late afternoon, and somehow the hangover I'd been expecting never comes. I fall asleep on the bus, and when I wake up we're unloading near an old Spanish cathedral that would look abandoned if not for the well-advertised gift shop next to it. The structure is small, and we're told it dates back to the late nineteenth century. The white façade is covered in the black and green stains that accumulate on porous walls in tropical climates, and it looks like it could cave in without much force. Inside, the waning sun cuts through stained glass windows that have been replaced many times, casting colorful geometry on the dirty tile floor. The sensation of déjà vu overtakes me for a moment as I look at the plaster icons, all white faces, contorted in agony, looking upward. I've always wondered where these icons come from, and, operating under the assumption that worshipping unseen gods does not automatically make someone unreasonable, I've wondered how these white European faces persist. The Santo Niño de Cebu is covered in elaborate royal silks and jewels worthy of a king, even though by Christianity's own accounts, the blessed child was born in a manger to a carpenter and a homemaker. The cathedral looks like every other Catholic
ruin in the so-called Third World. It doesn't seem unlike the cathedral in Fortín.

Outside there is a long iron stand where one can light a votive for a loved one. The candles are all different colors, and when they melt they drip their bright wax over the iron lip onto the ground, where it accumulates into a huge rainbow mass. After the church closes someone must scrape the iron and ground underneath, and the spent wax must be dealt with in some way to make room for tomorrow's candles. I wonder whether it's simply thrown away. Nearby, a child, maybe three or four years old, sits on a curb playing with something in his small hands. I wander over to him because it seems, at first, like he's alone. As soon as I near him, though, the street vendor who'd been stationed on the front sidewalk has turned and is watching me. I smile and nod, and he smiles back. The child looks up and shows me the small matchbox he'd been playing with. He slides it open and a thick black spider with blade-like legs pokes half its body out, and then it fully emerges to crawl around his hands as he laughs.

A few days later, our minders set us loose in Manila, and Jeremiah and I decide to wander around the city on foot without any destination in mind. After a long trek away from our posh hotel, through streets choked with trikes and lined with tall residential towers, we find our way into an area of densely packed buildings that aren't high-rises or newly erected condominiums. It feels like an actual neighborhood. A few kids kick a soccer ball against a tin gate. A woman hangs clothes on a line in a gangway between buildings. A man pulls up to a small grocery store on a bicycle with a large cart platform welded to the front. It's stacked about five feet high with what looks like thousands of eggs, and when he steps on his brakes they come sliding forward off the platform and onto the ground. A deluge of clear and yellow goo runs down the street. The grocer, an older woman wearing a
blue dress and apron and brown rubber sandals, runs out to help the poor man salvage some of his eggs, while a few stray cats lap yolks out of the gutter.

We wander for a few hours turning randomly down residential streets. Jeremiah is a good companion because he is as keen on getting lost and not talking as I am. Intermittently, and silently, he points at something he thinks I should see: a pink furry streak on the asphalt that had once been a kitten, a sign on a wall for legislation to outlaw the birth control pill, a small white duck with yellow feet waddling down a sidewalk as though it were running late for an appointment. Morning becomes noon and we can feel our scalps burning, so we decide to have lunch in the first place we see. As we cross the street toward a small outdoor restaurant, I hear the slapping of footsteps running toward us, and before we have time to think, there are two children, a girl and a boy, wrapped around us, begging for money in a few broken English phrases. Neither of us had seen them coming. The sound of accelerating footsteps coming up behind us had produced a ball in my throat, and my heart is still pumping so hard it feels as though something is slamming against my breastplate. The girl, maybe five or six, with a long black ponytail that goes down past her waist, has Jeremiah's arm in a tight hug, and the boy, around the same age, has all four limbs fastened around my leg. After I've processed that they're just children, I let out a breath I didn't realize I'd been holding. Our first reaction, which is to play with them, comes spontaneously, out of sheer astonishment and not knowing what else to do. Jeremiah gently begins swinging the young girl, lifting her off the ground, smiling, trying to get her to smile back. I look down at the boy, whose left eye is completely red with blood. He's barefoot, they both are, and even from above I can see thickened, cracked toes and soles from walking the streets without shoes. I puff out my lips and cross my eyes, which he can't help but laugh at. Their clothes are torn
and dirty, and they look malnourished. Jeremiah tells them in English that they need to let go of our arms so we can reach into our pockets, but they either don't understand or don't trust that we'll give them something if they do. We walk a few paces, pulling them along with us, and they continue laughing until we're in front of a 7-Eleven. Abruptly, they bolt away, sprinting across the street, disappearing around a corner. When we turn to look at what they'd seen, there's a guard standing in the window with his hand resting on the grip of a shotgun.

After this we both need beer. We sit under a red San Miguel umbrella in an outdoor restaurant decorated with hanging statues of pink cherubs trailing white ribbons. After our first beer, we decide we need another, and then another. We drink them fast, sitting silently in the shade for some time, not knowing what to say. After a while, I notice that almost everything around us—the napkin holders, the plastic tablecloths, the umbrella casting its red shade—reads
San Miguel
. I was under the impression it was a beer company, but later I'd learn it's the Philippines' largest corporation and has crept into energy, mining, infrastructure, and telecommunications, even a brief stint in commercial air travel. Its chairman, Eduardo Murphy Cojuangco Jr., advised US-backed dictator Ferdinand Marcos through the period of martial law from 1972 until 1981. After Marcos fell out of favor with the United States and fled the Philippines, Cojuangco transitioned into the public sector. At one point, it is estimated, his business empire accounted for one-quarter of the Filipino gross national product. Somehow the ubiquity of the brand name had escaped me until then, but once I was aware of it I saw it everywhere.

On our walk back to our hotel I thought about how transition and continuity are indistinguishable here. The historical sites we'd visited until then had been, if not aseptic, then old enough for spilled blood to have gone cold. They'd been
presented to us as historical, that is, they'd performed their historicity by being designated historical sites, relics of a dead and hermetically sealed past. They were set apart from the spaces and time in which they existed, so as tourists we were not obliged to consider the barefoot children in relation to the cathedrals, and the cathedrals in relation to the high-rises and banks. We weren't pressed to follow the gradient from the Spanish crown to American imperialism to our so-called soft power and cronies and corporations. The clipped official histories printed on plaques and materials for guided tours gave us the illusion of being observers, not participants.

We finish our beers and settle up because we have to meet the group for a tour of Intramuros, the walled city that served as the seat of government for the Spanish empire. On our walk back to the hotel we pass a neighborhood of houses made of scrap pieces of wood, corrugated tin, and cardboard. In the window of one there's a young boy, maybe four, leaning his head out, watching the cars go by.

In January 1898, Theodore Roosevelt, then assistant secretary of the navy under President William McKinley, wrote a letter to his brother-in-law in which he lamented “the queer lack of imperial instinct that our people show.” He, like many others in Washington, had his “imperial instinct” aroused in the US war with Spain and the possibility of acquiring former colonial possessions. Roosevelt became a leading voice in the push toward expansion in the Pacific as the natural extension of manifest destiny. There were all manner of political philosophies revived or constructed to justify this lust, including political gravitation, natural right, and natural growth. Despite popular resistance to the spirit sweeping Washington, the United States annexed the Philippines in 1899. When anti-imperialists pointed out that spreading the “empire of liberty” by force violated the core principle of
“consent of the governed,” written in the Declaration of Independence, Roosevelt pointed out that no “sane man” would think this was meant to apply to savages.

The walls of Intramuros are stained with patches of green moss that crawl up and over their highest points. Traffic flows down wide streets that run through openings in forty-foot-thick walls. The fortification is a collage of power and conflict, at times having been occupied, destroyed, rebuilt, and refortified by different belligerents fighting for different interests: landmass, regional control, and domination of trade routes. It has a different quality than the other ruins we've visited thus far, because it's functional and currently transited by locals making their way through Metro Manila.

While we're waiting for the horse-drawn carriages that will take us on our guided tour, I overhear a young boy speaking to his mother in a language I don't recognize before he switches midsentence to nearly unaccented English. Dressed in designer clothing, the mother holds a familiar brown leather purse covered in L's and V's. His quick bouncing between languages reminds me how it would be nearly impossible to find a place in which I couldn't make myself understood in English, about the power and prohibition that comes with speaking or not speaking one of these dominant global languages, and about how enduring the story of the shibboleth has been in our societies.

The boy had also reminded me of myself because of the way he switched languages with ease. He held his mother's hand, and his small voice quickly bounced through syllables. But the language he'd started with wasn't European. It confronted me with the reality that
I
only spoke the languages imposed by two kinds of conquest, and part of that violence had found its way into every aspect of my being: my culture, my speech, my very genetic makeup. Even the voice I hear in my head, the language in which I dream, the way the world
is formulated as it passes through my perception, bears those marks.

The carriages pull up, and we're loaded on. I'd thought someone would be guiding our tour with commentary but am pleased to find our carriage ride is silent. The walls of Intramuros have seen waves of violence from different sources, and now they attract tourists to the walled city. After the settler colonialism that had claimed the so-called New World, this seems to have been the first location upon which the United States projected itself imperially, this occupation of an already occupied capital city. Historians disagree about what Thomas Jefferson meant when he formulated America as an “empire of liberty,” but the annexation of the Philippines through the abject horrors of war, the immeasurable amount of blood spilled in the process, is another example of why his intent was irrelevant, his words empty. Near the Puerta Isabel II, an entrance and exit in the walled city named after a nineteenth-century Spanish queen, there are the familiar green plastic letters that spell out “Starbucks Coffee” on a wall that bears the ghosts of some of the most brutal history of our past.