Category Archive for: bayan

komentaryo

notes on TEDx Diliman: ideas worth spreading?

TEDx Talks are independently organized TED talks across the world, which is about “riveting talks by remarkable people.” TEDx Diliman was my first. This is a review of each of the TED talks that were part of it, done in 18 minutes or less, because that’s the time limit of a TED Talk. Read more about TED here, and check out this really good video on TEDx here.

Roby Alampay on freedom is our competitive advantage

the thing with saying that the Philippines’ advantage is our freedom is that the only idea it gets across is a romance with the freedom of expression we enjoy (as exemplified apparently by having the TEDx talk to begin with, Alampay says), which of course also means limning over the fact of activists being jailed and disappeared, cultural worker Ericson Acosta still being in jail, and really begs the question: what freedom?

Alampay’s 18++ minutes (yes he was allowed) was spent talking about freedom being our competitive advantage because it can mean making the country the center not just of civil society which feeds off of freedom, but also the center of academic freedom (“Kaya namin ‘yon!” he says). both will mean generating jobs and contributing to the economy, creating an industry out of our freedom.

for Alampay, freedom is the card we can play, because, and i quote: 

freedom is the one thing we do better than anybody else.

do we? really do freedom well I mean? Alampay uses the example of CCP’s closure of the Kulo exhibit (without mentioning it of course), without realizing that in fact in fact more than proving that the gov’t can just take away our freedom, that incident also proved that when we are questioned about our freedom, we have no idea how to defend ourselves. we mess it up completely: our artists, curators, cultural workers. we do not know how to defend ourselves, we do not know how to talk to media, to the people who don’t care for our art but will care about religion, and we mess it up. that is us messing up even as we are free. that is proof that we don’t do freedom well.

even more false? the idea that there’s academic freedom where we are. i’ve lived off of two universities in this country, and when you’re immersed in that manner you also know that in fact your freedoms are false in these institutions, they are limited to what is the intellectual parochialism that’s there, they are limited by the people who have been in the academe all these years.

most importantly, academic freedom, artistic freedom, freedom of expression are all highly questionable when you come from here and know | feel | see that freedom is also overrated when it cannot will not put food on people’s tables and more and more people are falling below the poverty line.

and if you live in the Philippines, you must also know — and must admit — that most of the time we are delusional about our freedom because we are middle class educated English-speaking TEDx speakers. or, as Alampay says, he’s an economy of one, dreaming.

dreams are good. but as ungrounded and unfulfilled, as romanticized and sophomoric as this? not at all worthy of a TEDx talk. but it sure sounds like something the PNoy government would love to hear.

kultura

admitting to class differences, the dream of readers at home: Butch Dalisay and Phil writing

<…> if these two talks of Dalisay are any indication <…> what our texts have and what ails our texts by default given colonial history <is that> we are out of the Commonwealth loop <…> and while American colonization gave us the English that we use for our writing, we all seem to have forgotten that, and we’re like the bastard children that appear at the family Christmas dinner. There are no favors to be had from our colonial fathers here, and it can only be difficult to deal with expectations.

Such as what Dalisay sees to be the “mournful wail of oppression” as the one thing expected of work from the Philippines, the main thing a writer must be able to work against. But towards what? Again another bottomline: the problem is that even we don’t know what we’re about, so how do we even begin projecting ourselves to the world?

Maybe we begin with what is inescapable. As far as Dalisay is concerned, there’s no escaping class, not for any writer, not for any kind of writing. There’s no avoiding the divide between rich and poor, and in that sense it could be a trope, the one thing that we cannot ignore in the task of writing, especially in English, especially given that this means having very few readers where we come from. And it is a trope that encompasses even that which Dalisay considers to be the most important story for Filipinos of our time: the diaspora. 

read the rest here!

kultura

because literature IS serious business

It seems like a foregone conclusion: how else would Singapore do a writers’ festival but with seriousness and business-like professionalism? What’s striking about the first few days of the Singapore Writers’ Festival (SWF) though is this: while business sense would dictate the selling of books in relation to the event, there’s also a clear sense here of going beyond that. And the SWF does so by showing us how literature and writing might on the one hand be celebrated as creative endeavor, and on the other assessed as end product with goals of publication and readership, always with the possibility of the text affecting change.

This is to say that each of the panels I went to were done professionally at the SWF, where moderators had read the books of the writers they were to have conversations with, where they actually become credible points of reference for a discussion with the audience. My context obviously is the Philippines, where even international conferences suffer not just because of sloppy work by local scholars, but even more so unprofessional moderators who think that hosting à la talk show is what this role calls for.

But I digress, and I only do so because of envy: much might be said after all for professionalism especially when it comes to literature and writing, particularly because by our mere existence as writers and critics we demand that it be seen as important. At the SWF, the first thing that’s equated with its importance is a clear respect for writers, which begins with reading their work beforehand.

Read the rest here!

komentaryo

poverty ain’t a blessing

The Church and reproductive health
by Juan Miguel Luz

When RH is portrayed as a great evil and when women and men who choose to pursue RH measures, notably contraception, are deemed to be sinners by Church leaders, this is neither fair nor informed.

The greater sin would be to bring any number of children into a world of poverty.When parents do so with no means to provide adequately for them nor provide them a chance at a decent quality of life, they do themselves and their children a great wrong by placing the family at great risk. (I consider poverty a great risk and not a blessing despite what the Church might think.)

A government that does not provide the means by which families of any income group (but especially the poor) can help plan family size and expectations would thus be an irresponsible one.

Read the rest of it here!

kultura

on naming Ballet Philippines as the Phil Nat’l Ballet Company

and questions on national and cultural, and the crisis that is Philippine dance, that can only resonate for the rest of culture industry in this country. excerpt from the piece by Myra Beltran:

<…this> greatly changed environment <…> also signals that the bill can be examined in terms of its assumptions about the “national” and “culture” (Philippine culture). These are the discourses which inform the bill. These discourses summoned by the bill then imply that a deeper discussion on this bill apart from the one centered on who is “more deserving” or not, can be made and that it is no easy labelling of being “for” or “against” the bill. It does not seem to be as simple as saying or implying that that those who oppose this bill would probably not oppose if they had been the beneficiary or implementor of this bill – rather, part of those who are being dismissed as simply “against” truly mean to have a sincere inquiry as to who is speaking for whom in this bill, what is being spoken in behalf of the “whom,” and whether the answer to this should be enacted into law as a republic act. [5] I suppose those are also topics which also concern the entire arts community as all precedents do have a subsequent ripple effect.

A case in point is that one of the reasons cited by Ballet Philippines in seeking the status of “national” is the precedent set by the naming of the Bayanihan Philippine Dance Company as the “national folk dance company” (R.A. 8626 by the 10th Congress) with the contention that others who oppose this current bill would do well to seek the same for themselves, “to work for it”, [6] as the Bayanihan bill itself provides. On this count, and if one were to proceed to “work for it,” the proposed bill also summons the notion and the distinction between a “national folk dance company” and a “national ballet company” as both representative of “Philippine culture.” And then after, if one indeed were to “work for it,” what kind of “national” entity would one be? The same question would be posed to one working for a “national theatre company” or “national orchestra” in the future.

click here for the rest of it.