identity crisis...me or my country? LOL!
when i was in Hong Kong, i was mistaken for a Japanese.
when i was in Stockholm, I was mistaken as an Italian.
when i was in Taipei, i was mistaken as a Thai.
when i was in Bangkok, i was mistaken as a local Thai.
when i'm here in Singapore, I'm mistaken as a Malay.
lastnight, I spoke to a Brazilian at a friend's birthday party and he said if i step foot in Sao Paolo (pronounced as SAOMP-PAOLO), i'd be mistaken as a Bolivian or Peruvian. LOL!
i realized it reflects how similarly my country is like right now. Asian or Latin in looks? ways? language? and Westernized in so many ways.
i wonder when colonialism will end in my country.
I want to share with you a quote from F. Sionil Jose (Filipino National Artist for Literature, Foremost Novelist)...I got this from a fellow blogger (http://whitewatcher.blogspot.com)
F. Sionil Jose on HINSIGHT (Sun, 4 Feb. 2007)
The colonized intellectual must first free himself, his mind most of all, from the subterfuges of the colonizer. He must recover the pristine self even if this means, as Nick Joaquin once charged, "to be an Igorot" ---as if being one is to be stigmatized. Start from the mud at our feet, from mythic incense, the life-giving impulse of the cosmos, and from this purity, recognize the inputs of history, all the precious elements that contribute to the building of a nation.
Only when the colonized has achieved this innate freedom will he then be able to assume his true identity. Otherwise, his thinking will always be a monotonous echo of the colonizer's dulcet spiel.
So it goes today: our modern ilustrados have yet to free themselves from prisons of the past, from the chains of colonialism, particularly the domestic variety. Until they recognize this bondage and oppose it, we will continue to wallow in blissful ignorance, and worse, in the muck of spiritual poverty left by the ghosts of colonialism.
when i was in Stockholm, I was mistaken as an Italian.
when i was in Taipei, i was mistaken as a Thai.
when i was in Bangkok, i was mistaken as a local Thai.
when i'm here in Singapore, I'm mistaken as a Malay.
lastnight, I spoke to a Brazilian at a friend's birthday party and he said if i step foot in Sao Paolo (pronounced as SAOMP-PAOLO), i'd be mistaken as a Bolivian or Peruvian. LOL!
i realized it reflects how similarly my country is like right now. Asian or Latin in looks? ways? language? and Westernized in so many ways.
i wonder when colonialism will end in my country.
I want to share with you a quote from F. Sionil Jose (Filipino National Artist for Literature, Foremost Novelist)...I got this from a fellow blogger (http://whitewatcher.blogspot.com)
F. Sionil Jose on HINSIGHT (Sun, 4 Feb. 2007)
The colonized intellectual must first free himself, his mind most of all, from the subterfuges of the colonizer. He must recover the pristine self even if this means, as Nick Joaquin once charged, "to be an Igorot" ---as if being one is to be stigmatized. Start from the mud at our feet, from mythic incense, the life-giving impulse of the cosmos, and from this purity, recognize the inputs of history, all the precious elements that contribute to the building of a nation.
Only when the colonized has achieved this innate freedom will he then be able to assume his true identity. Otherwise, his thinking will always be a monotonous echo of the colonizer's dulcet spiel.
So it goes today: our modern ilustrados have yet to free themselves from prisons of the past, from the chains of colonialism, particularly the domestic variety. Until they recognize this bondage and oppose it, we will continue to wallow in blissful ignorance, and worse, in the muck of spiritual poverty left by the ghosts of colonialism.