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Myself, Elsewhere is the first part of Carmen
Guerrero Nakpil’s promised trilogy of her memoirs. It is, of
course, autobiography and history, plus philosophy and ethos,
nostalgia and mores, and finally perspective. The book is under 200
pages but it weighs in with enough to make one reflect and analyze
the life and perspective of one of our most outstanding, quite
enduring, definitely impressive journalists of our day and age as
she compellingly draws an aspect of the Filipino experience.
Few can do better at presenting
their life within the historical moment and sociological context of
their time and place while taking note of the radical changes and
the subtle nuances that eventually intrude into and redraw what was
there in the beginning.
Ermita is the place, the smallest
suburb or arrabal of Manila and the 1920s is the beginning of these
memoirs, a time and a setting meticulously and felicitously
described by Guerrero Nakpil so faultlessly that it captures us in
its self-contained environment as we read on.
The American Present was still
overshadowed by the Spanish Past when Guerrero Nakpil was born. Two
cultures were interacting not without their partisans feeling the
friction between the old and the new. Guerrero Nakpil’s memoirs
are not an exercise in nostalgia, though it initially touches us as
such, but a declaration of love that we totally understand. As she
says:
“I write about my years in
Ermita before World War II, not with the usual maudlin, nostalgic
weakness for the past, but in profound affection for that lost time
and place.”
The autobiography, the Philippine
History that is delineated, the Ermita that was, make for a
narrative of loss that echoes through our own lives. Looking back at
what we know of what was our prehistoric society in juxtaposition
with our arrival into history, the experience cannot but be
interpreted as a loss of identity, a loss of land and resources, a
loss of tradition. History was a superimposition of something alien,
a radically different lifestyle without the freedom of choice.
Ermita of prehistory and history is physically gone, having been
first altered by alien cultures that merged into each other in
tension dismantling or alienating what existed before. It was
eventually physically destroyed to the point of unrecognition and
Biblical desolation. It has never been resurrected, it is lost to
time and to man. Guerrero Nakpil’s life as an Ermitense of a
certain age has endured loss of loved ones, home, a way of life, an
accepted value system, comfort and security.
We read this autobiography and
empathize with our own experience of living in this country. Indeed,
it is virtually the story of all colonization and finds its
parallels in Asia, the Middle East, the Americas even in recent
times. The sense of loss is not for us to dwell in it for all time
and thus remain victimized and aggrieved but to understand and learn
what and who we were in the past which has to explain our present
and make us react to the best of our ability so as to take the
future into our own hands following our minds and hearts. There is
nothing like the confrontation and contemplation of truth to put
things in rightful places or create the reasonable and right
perspective.
And Guerrero Nakpil brings us the
truth of what Ermita was like, how life in the Philippines was, what
people believed in and lived by from the 1920’s till it all ended
with the advent of World War II. Most of us look back to those years
through our elders and see them as Edenic for what the author calls
“the even tenor of our days.” In a sense, it was an instinctive
rather than a thoughtful life fixed simply in the present for its
comfort and familiarity, without a thought to its factors and
parameters. It is a capsule history of country and people that has
marked those who were part of it and those who will know about it
through the vicarious experience of reading this book.
(Concluded in M. I. Ongpin’s
column, Ambient Voices, on Friday February 2.)
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