The vernacular as method for memory and time: A philological and cultural exploration of Filipino concepts for Memory Studies

Introduction

Ferdinand de Saussure’s famous Cours de linguistique générale (2010) influenced the linguistic and neo-linguistic turn in the humanities since the 1970s until today. Filipino scholar Oscar Campomanes (2019) acknowledges how Saussure’s work “entailed significant epistemological reversals, not only in the discipline of linguistics, where it originated but also, beyond it, in neighboring disciplines such as literary study, anthropology and sociology, historiography, philosophy, media, and communication studies, the history of science, psychology, and belatedly, political science” (p. 5). To this list, and for our present interest, I will add Memory Studies.

Henceforth, language has no longer been confined to a mere medium of expression, rather, as “world-constituting” (Campomanes, 2019: 5), providing the foundations for human subjectivity, community, reality, and thought processes (Kristeva, 1989: 6–8). Indeed, according to Julia Kristeva:

The conception of language as the ‘key’ to man and to social history and as the means of access to the laws of societal functioning constitutes perhaps one of the most striking characteristics of our era. . . Today. . .it is grasped as a particular object of knowledge, and considered capable of introducing us not only to the laws of its own functioning but also to all that concerns the social realm (1989: 3).

In the same vein, Terry Eagleton declares: “What else is language but the bridge which links [literature and civilisations]? Language is the medium in which both Culture and culture—literary art and human society—come to consciousness” (2007: 8).

If language is thus key to thought processes, communities and world-knowledge production, then the vernacular can be considered as a method and its “words as discursive entry points” (Benitez, 2019: 459). Consequently, in this piece, I will survey some signifiers in the Filipino language as entry points to Memory Studies. Theorization of memory and time will thus be postponed and articulated only after or in parallel with the indigenous concept to be studied. This method thus invites a suspension of one’s habitual “epistemological door” or framework in favor of apophatic listening-reading, via language, to the world and thought-process of a culture.

Apophatic listening, according to Andrew Dobson, involves a temporary suspension of one’s own categories, frames and expectations “with a view (a) to listening to what is ‘actually being said’, and (b) to listening out for the unexpected and surprising” (2014: 173). Cataphatic listening, on the contrary, “is mediated by already existing categories and expectations” (Dobson, 2014: 173). Similar to the process of political listening, this article sees in the linguistic turn a means of cultural memory dialogue. “Rather than charging in with a pet theory and fitting complex events” (Bassel, 2016: 4) or a specific reality, this study first seeks to “listen” to the indigenous culture’s own terms in order, afterwards, to enter into dialogue with others. While “theory-mindedness is important,” opines Resil Mojares, reflecting on the state of literary research in the Philippines, one has the “impression that much work seems more ‘theory-driven’ than ‘data-driven’” (1998: 12). ¹ As a counter-example, Mojares lauds the work of Philippine National Artist Virgilio Almario who builds “from the ground up” (1998: 12).

Taking my cue from Almario and many other Filipino intellectuals today, I suggest operating in the same way: to build from the ground up. I will therefore explore the ways Filipino indigenous concepts and contexts compare, challenge and enrich current Memory and Trauma Studies. After this introduction, I will proceed in three parts. First, I shall examine a set of terms that show more or less an equivalence with Western conceptions of remembering and forgetting. Second, I will study another group of signifiers that enrich memory concepts because of their value (de Saussure, 2010). ² I refer specifically to (ma)tandà(an), agam, limot/limót and panahon. Third, before concluding, I will look into a last series of cultural concepts that challenge and enrich Trauma Studies, specifically, its Freudian and Holocaust -based history. Here, I will dwell on notions that denote group culture, namely, kapwa, utang-na-loob, and bayanihan; Manilaner, a hybrid term, and desaparesidos, an appropriated word.

Part of the Melayo-Polynesian set of Austronesian languages, Filipino, the national language, is based on Tagalog, which has 26 million native speakers (Clark, 2018:799). Equally important, there are over a hundred other spoken Austronesian languages in the Philippines which include Ilokano, Bikol, Cebuano and Hiligaynon, to name a few (Clark, 2018:799). Initially, Tagalog was named as official language in 1937, then changed to Filipino in 1987 in order to include influences from other local and foreign languages. The lexicon echoes borrowings from Spanish and English, reflecting the country’s colonial domination by Spain and the U.S., respectively. Today, Filipino and English are the two official languages of the country.

Among certain scholarly circles today, there is a thrust towards an intellectualization of Filipino, despite a Supreme Court decision to remove Filipino as a subject from the New General Education Curriculum last 2018. Already, in 1992, Virgilio Almario warned against a certain educated class of individuals who are content in just getting by the language without studying it (“Idinaan nila sa wido ang paggamit ng Filipino. Ayaw pag-aralan”) (2009: 32). He thus encourages to study the dictionary: ang pagbubuklat ng diksiyonaryo ay maaaring maging isang gawain ng pagtuklas. . . naghahanap ng paliwanag sa ugat at talinhaga ng isang salita (opening the dictionary could be a work of research/ investigation. . . to look for explanations on the root and mystery of a word) (Almario, 2009: 124). Towards this end, my main reference in this essay will be the Diksyunaryo ng Wikang Filipino, or the Dictionary of the Filipino Language, centennial edition, prepared by the Komisyon ng Wikang Filipino (1998) (Commission of the Filipino language). ³ Since this first part compares Filipino words with more European-based concepts, my analysis will be limited by some of the languages I know. ⁴

Exploring memory and time in the vernacular

There exists over a dozen ways of signifying memory or remembering in Filipino. The words gunitâ, alaala and memorya, as nouns (pangngalan), all refer to the human capacity to recall the past (kakayahan o kapangyarihan ng isip na magtanda ng mga nakaraan). These three words refer to remembering as a “capacity” (kakayahan) or power (kapangyarihan) which may remind one of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Paul Ricoeur situating mnemonic phenomena from the standpoint of capacities (Ricoeur, 2003: 21, emphasis mine). As such, human will is summoned as is the case in anamnesis—remembering as a laborious search—as opposed to mneme, which, already according to Aristotle (2007), indicates random involuntary memory. Following this latter idea, sumagi sa gunita comes close to expressions such as “it came to mind,” “it occurred to me” or, in French, il m’est venu à l’esprit which are all involuntary. Sumagi denotes an unintentional or accidental touch or episode.

Furthermore, gunitâ, according to the Diksyunaryo, can also mean pagbabalik sa isip, literally, “a coming back to the mind.” Memory can hence leave and return. It is mobile and travelling. It implies a voyage back, thus reminding one how forgetting is an integral part of remembering, or, in Richard Terdiman’s succinct formulation, how “forgetting is a form of remembering” (1993: 250). A gunitâ also denotes forgetting as only, according to Ricoeur, an oubli de reserve, a back-up forgetting (2003: 412), rather than an inexorable erasure of traces. Memory can thus come back like a heavy weight rising from Lethe, the river of oblivion in ancient Greek mythology. Gunitâ also evokes one of Edward Casey’s mnemonic modes, ⁵ that is, recognition, the end of a search.

Like gunitâ, alaala also signifies a capacity to recall. Interestingly, it also denotes “a thing or anything given as a gift” (bagay o anumang ibinibigay bilang handog). How interesting that a word encapsulates both memory and gift, close to the German Andenken (although denken can also mean “to think”); and the French noun souvenir, which can indicate an object or memory. ⁶

Still, ipamemorya or isaulo, both verbs, correspond to memorisation, another cognitive process that has been linked to ars memoriae, the art of memory training, the (ambitious) effort to counter forgetfulness (Frances Yates, 1966). However, memorisation has also been unpopular and sometimes even contrasted with “real” remembering since it is but an “artificial memory” which can be prey to manipulation (Ricoeur, 2003: 67). ⁷

A memoryal is that which is closest to the notion of a lieu de mémoire. As a noun, it includes “anything erected in order to let people remember an important event, deed, etc. (e.g. a monument, a statue, and others)” (anumang bagay na itinayo upang makapagpaalala sa mga tao ng isang mahalangang pangyayari, gawain, atb. (tulad ng isang bantayog, estatwa, atb.)).

Another word which registers memory but also doubt, fear or worry is salamisim. According to the Diksyunaryo, salamisim means “a vague memory” (malabong alaala) so that something that is masalamisim, its adjectival form, would indicate doubtfulness. A synonym of salamisim is a guniguni which stands for “a formation of images or thoughts on things that did not really exist” (pagbubuo ng mga larawang pangkaisipan o mga palagay tungkol sa mga bagay na hindi naman tunay na nangyari). Such thoughts “spring from imagination” (bunga ng imahinasyon). As such, one can even argue that guniguni is no longer a faculty of memory.

What is fascinating to take note of here, however, is the link made between salamisim and guniguni. Their association calls into mind the unpopularity and unreliability of memory since it is prey to imagination and thus evoking a sense of spectrality, of phantasma (Ricoeur, 2003: 6). But of course, there is a difference between memory and imagination. While both imagination and memory bring into the present that which is absent, imagination is dispensed of its service to the past. In The Psychology of Imagination, Jean-Paul Sartre explains that if “I recall an incident to my past life I do not imagine it, I recall it” (1965: 263). While a memory can be accused of spectrality and vagueness, the Filipino language, through salamisim, provides a word for a type of remembering as vague.

Thus far, one can observe that, in the Filipino language, memory, as a noun, can signify or allude to a capacity and power, a “coming back,” a gift and a lieu de mémoire. Salamisim also indicates a type of memory that is vague. Rather than a mere enumeration of synonyms for “memory,” this section highlights a method of approaching a memory epistemology via a close-reading of signifiers in the vernacular, thus allowing its culture to be considered in its own terms first. A comparison with other languages then shows similar thought-processes and world views regarding some memory terminologies. I can now thus turn to signifiers that offer several levels of meaning.

The Diksyunaryo ng Wikang Filipino accords tandaan, a verb, two significations: (1) “to put a mark” (lagyan ng tanda; markahan); and (2) “to plant in memory; not forget” (itanim sa alaala; huwag kalilimutan). Tandaan’s first meaning is reminiscent of Plato’s wax tablet where remembrance is likened to the match between the mark that was embedded and its corresponding shape: “whatever is impressed upon the wax, we remember and know so long as the image remains in the wax; whatever is obliterated or cannot be impressed, we forget and do not know” (Ricoeur, 2003: 9). Thus, a mismatch would, on the contrary, evoke forgetting.

Tandaan’s second sense, to “not forget,” reminds us again of anamnesis, which Aristotle already described as an arduous search. Further, the idea of a “planting” in memory conjures notions of nurturing and cultivation, a duty, again ascertaining the tradition of devoir de mémoire Memory Studies is too familiar with.

The root word of tandaan is tandà which indicates a mark (marka, senyal), or “a sure knowledge of the past” (pagkaalam ng may katiyakan sa nakaraan), contrary to salamisim which is a vague remembrance of the past. Thus, in Filipino, both “sure” and “vague” remembering merit distinct signifiers.

Moreover, tandà is also a signifier of age (kahigtan ng gulang) such that one calls an old person, a matandà. On the one hand, the matandà, an elderly person, has a capacity to reach out to a long past. In John Locke’s study of consciousness and identity, the philosopher posits that “as far as [a] consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought, so far reaches the identity of that person; it is the same self now as it was then; and it is by the same self with this present one that now reflects on it, that that action was done” (2008: 39). Thus, the matandà can be matandain, or can remember a lot and thus claim a “thickness” of identity. On the other hand, he or she is also subject to senility, dementia and forgetfulness. As such, the old person, the matandà, in one word, embodies the generally accepted inseparable dialectic of remembering and forgetting (Plate, 2015: 144) and illustrates, once more, how forgetting is a “component of memory itself” (Augé, 2004: 15).

Furthermore, the admonishing expression, hindi ka na nagtanda, while it literally stands for “you haven’t grown older” or “you haven’t remembered,” is usually used to mean “you haven’t learned” (from the past or from past lessons). Here, it is interesting to note how remembering and aging are made equivalent to acquiring wisdom, indicative of an Asian culture that respects elders and the aged. At the same time, it is not new that memory and knowledge are considered together on one side, while oblivion and ignorance are grouped onto another (Plate, 2015: 148). Thus, tandà and its variations designate a mark, a sign, remembering, aging and acquisition of wisdom.

Still according to the Diksyunaryo, “forgetting” is translated as limot, the noun and limót, as adjective as in ang limót na bayani or the “forgotten hero.” Interestingly, limót has another signification: it means “picking up something from the floor or earth” (pagdampot ng isang bagay mula sa sahig o lupa), or, in French, ramasser quelquechose par terre. Such imagery is quite instructive: it implies that something dropped. This representation can be compared to the etymological meaning of the Dutch vergeten and the German vergessen, where ver implies the “loss” of getan, which means “to seize or to hold,” thus “to lose one’s hold” (Plate, 2015: 145). However, limot/ limót does not dwell on the “losing,” rather on the “picking up.” Reminiscent of matandà, in which opposites can cohabit in a word, limot/ limót ⁸ can stand for oblivion and a gathering, a re-collection.

The last word to be considered in this section appropriately affords us a transition to the next section on traumatic memory. It is fascinating to dwell on agam-agam because it carries dimensions of the future and of the past. First of all, the Diksyunaryo accords it a meaning of uncertainty and foreboding feelings of doubt and fear (alinlangan, kutob, pangamba). Indeed, it is usually in contexts like these that the signifier is known for: one can have an agam-agam for the past, present and future.

It is hence not surprising that the Institute for Climate and Sustainable Cities entitled their award-winning book Agam (2014). The volume was published as a response to super typhoon Haiyan which, on 8 November 2013, killed over 6000 people, thus making it “one of the most powerful typhoons ever to make landfall in recorded history” (Lagmay et al., 2015). The volume quotes the UP Diksiyonaryong Filipino (2001) to ascertain that agam, not only refers to disquiet and doubt, but also “a memory of the past, and the ability to think” (ICSC, 2014: xvii). For a country besieged by twenty typhoons a year, the ability to plan within “cultures of disaster” (Bankhoff, 2003) becomes an imperative. Hence, agam can turn towards both future and past.

It would be interesting to compare a term such as agam, which encapsulates both memory and fearful foreboding, specifically within the context of climate disasters, to Pretraumatic Stress Syndrome (PreTss). In her work Climate Trauma (2016), E. Ann Kaplan situates PreTss against the more familiar Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) which is a condition triggered in the present by past events. In pretrauma, on the other hand, “people unconsciously suffer from an immobilizing anticipatory anxiety about the future” (Kaplan, 2016: xix). Drawing her example post Hurricane Sandy, Kaplan describes PreTss as a “fear of a future terrifying event of a similar kind” (2016: xix). As such, PreTss is a future fear based on a similar trauma of the past. Thus, PreTss resembles agam inasmuch as past and future are combined in one term. I am not suggesting agam to serve as a psychological equivalent of pretrauma; what I note is the similarity in terms of “anxiety about the future.”

However, while PreTss relates itself to trauma, agam includes a faculty of planning ahead, an ability to think. Such an idea leads one to reflect on the notion of time and resilience in a country such as the Philippines where climate disasters are no longer extraordinary events but “regular visitors.” In a sense, Filipinos had to and should continuously learn the art of cohabiting ⁹ with nature in its less-desirable forms: typhoons, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. In fact, during the course of writing this piece, Taal Volcano had been erupting, causing the evacuation of over 400,000 people from their homes. Stationed in the capital, I was fortunate to be exposed only to ash fall. In spite of this, I realized how the volcano dictated time; how nature has fashioned us to be flexible with our schedules, plans, investments, life. It is no surprise then, that the concept of panahon indicates both time and weather, ¹⁰ at least.

Christian Benitez’s extensive reflection on panahon illustrates different usages of the word, which, aside from “time” and “weather,” can also refer to “season,” such as a “time of bounty” ¹¹ (panahon ng kasaganaan), thus, “opportunity—of making time for life-sustaining activity, of carving out a space of work and living” (Mojares, 1998: 59). ¹² This opportunity (pagkakataon), denotes “an outcome that is probable and yet uncertain” (Benitez, 2019: 472). Moreover, panahon also carries with it links to “planting” and a gathering of one’s harvest (Benitez, 2019: 466–468). Hence, Benitez argues how panahon can be “articulated as oriented toward plenitude and assemblage” (2019: 477) and, drawing from Leonardo Mercado, how “the Filipino wants to be in harmony with nature” (1972: 484). As far as this selective list is concerned, panahon is associated with weather, opportunity, harmony, assemblage and planting. Time is thus seasonal—which is both chronological and unpredictable, requiring one to both plan and be (very) flexible.

In comparison, the Indo-European root of the word “time,” di or dai, means “to divide,” as one divides days into hours (Rovelli, 2019: 53), thus inscribing classification in time. The Cartesian mind has ordered time. In a fascinating lecture entitled “The physics and philosophy of time,” Carlo Rovelli, author of The Order of Time, demonstrates how time is both linear and not linear. From the point of view of physics and its related disciplines, the “now” is relative, with time being hardly anything but “ordered.” Our notion of a linearity of time actually comes from our brain, thanks to our faculty to narrate. Memory allows us to “arrange time”—an idea that thinkers like Augustine, Marcel Proust, and Paul Ricoeur have already articulated in the past. Hence, it is not surprising that history, memory and narration have been, more than once, analysed together.

In Filipino, the word istorya ¹³ signifies both narrative and story (salaysay, kwento), as well as the discipline taught in schools (sangay ng karunungan tungkol sa nakaraan). This resembles the French histoire and the German Geschichte. Interestingly, another Filipino word for “history” is kasaysayan, the root word of which, saysay, ¹⁴ indicates “to have meaning.” Thus, meaning is to be found “inside” narration. Having said this, however, time, as Rovelli argues, is hardly “in order.” As such panahon, both chronological and unpredictable, actually, allows a more accurate description of time, in the sense explained by Rovelli.

I will return to the discussion of memory, time and the vernacular in the concluding part of this essay. At this point, however, I would like to analyse three other concepts which are related to traumatic memory. I refer to kapwa, Manilaners and desaparesidos.

Reframing paradigms of Trauma Studies

Trauma Studies, now more and more considered as a sub-field of Memory Studies, has witnessed a turn. A developing field since the 1980s spearheaded by deconstructionist scholars at Yale University, primarily Cathy Caruth and Geoffrey Hartman, trauma theory was influenced a lot by Holocaust Studies. Consequently, Trauma Studies privileged discourses that focused on the Shoah. As a recognized paradigm of European trauma, the Holocaust can be regarded as a “cosmopolitan memory” which “harbors the possibility of transcending ethnic and national boundaries” because its changing representations have become politically and culturally symbolic (Levy and Sznaider, 2006: 4).

However, since the postcolonial turn in Trauma Studies, the paradigmatic status of the Shoah has been put into question, thus opening up the field to other trauma models in the world. Stef Craps maintains that trauma experiences from other nations “not only have to be acknowledged more fully, on their own terms, and in their own terms, but they also have to be considered in relation to traumatic metropolitan or First World histories for trauma studies to have any hope of redeeming its promise of ethical effectiveness” (2013: 6).

Another preferred paradigm of the pioneers of Trauma Studies is a certain form of Post-traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD) which also privileges a certain type of working-through. Generally characterized by intrusive flashbacks, recurring dreams, emotional numbing, absence of recall, loss of temper control, hyper-vigilance or exaggerated startle response (Luckhurst, 2008: 1), PTSD and its symptoms are officialized by the American Psychological Association (APA). Such generalized description has seen a lot of revisions over the years. ¹⁵

Traumatized patients, with the help of a professional, should ideally “work-through” his or her blocked memory that has been repressed because of trauma. Working-through, an appropriate translation of Freud’s durcharbeiten, could simply signify a “healing” or, better, a “coming-to-terms with” the past. The original German term for work, Arbeit, underscores the effort that is required in therapy. In Freud’s 1914 description of treatment, the effort of work comes from both doctor and patient: while the patient must “find the courage to direct his attention to the phenomena of his illness” (1914: 152), the analyst or doctor should be forbearing in uncovering the resistance and in acquainting the patient with it. However, since the postcolonial turn in Trauma Studies, other scholars have questioned the limiting criteria of PTSD. I will just give two examples here before proceeding to the Filipino context.

Maria Root introduces the notion of insidious trauma to describe “the traumatogenic effects of oppression that are not necessarily overtly violent or threatening to bodily wellbeing at the given moment but that do violence to the soul and spirit” (Brown, 1995: 107). Examples of insidious trauma operate in societies that consciously or unconsciously promote long-standing racism, violent sexism or rape culture. ¹⁶ The notion of insidious trauma allows us to consider that solutions to trauma can no longer be confined to a therapy of individuals only; it also posits that systemic social change should be part of the solution.

Furthermore, Carol Kidron’s research on “Baksbat” (2016), a specific Khmer survivors’ type of PTSD, also questions the stability of the American Psychological Association-mandated PTSD. While it shares PTSD’s symptoms of numbing, anxiety, depression and flashbacks, Baksbat is further characterized by passivity and hopelessness which translate to psychosocial ills of abuse, alcoholism, and family conflict.

Similar to the above examples where culture and context need to be included in any project of interventions and “healing,” the Filipino notion of kapwa, which is roughly translated as “fellow-human being,” informs how individual identities are based on community belongingness. Understanding this would impact coming-to-terms with traumatic memory by shifting from a one-to-one Freudian therapeutic model towards a group-based one.

The Filipino barangay or “group culture” can be traced back to its Malay and Indonesian ancestry, which places emphasis on the family (Torres-D’Mello, 2001: 47, 61–63; Hall, 2001: 54–55). Akin to the Japanese bushido spirit, which stresses loyalty, this group culture places the family’s need or the group’s welfare first before the individual’s own interest (Torres D’Mello, 2001: 47, 61–63). As Filipino psychologist Virgilio Enriquez explains, once the “ako [ego] starts thinking of himself as separate from kapwa [fellowmen], the Filipino “self” gets to be individuated . . . and, in effect, denies the status of kapwa to the other. By the same token, the status of kapwa is also denied to the self” (1992: 54).

Group culture can be seen again in the context of the Yolanda/Haiyan storm surge of 2013. In the study “Obliged to be Grateful,” which surveyed foreign aid, the Filipino sense of kapwa comes into conflict with targeted interventions “within tight-knit communities. . . when people are excluded from aid” (Ong et al., 2015: 8). Petty jealousies may result if one neighbor does not receive aid while another does. In other words, Western modes of individualized traumatic help may run against a form of healing that needs to consider group culture.

Moreover, this document problematizes the Filipino principle of debt of gratitude or utang-na-loob which underpins social relations. It implies reciprocity or gratitude towards someone who has extended aid. However, when combined with the long history of the Philippines’ colonial relations where benefactors can also be regarded as patrons, how relevant is feedback from affected communities towards humanitarians to whom they owe a debt of gratitude?

Aside from “Obliged to be Grateful,” another interesting work, Katatagan. A Resilience Program for Filipino Survivors, draws from Filipino culture in order to propose katatagan or resilience. Published by the Psychological Association of the Philippines in 2015, it is a manual conceived to help survivors of disasters after an emergency period. I would like to point out three interesting points where culture and psychological coming-to-terms are made to work together:

Filipino Values. The design is nuanced on Filipino culture. The modules are group-based because it recognizes the collective nature of Filipinos and that seeking social support and bayanihan (or collective action) is a natural response of Filipinos.

Availability of Mental Health Resources. The program recognizes the dearth of mental health resources in the Philippines. With only one mental health practitioner for every 100,000 Filipinos, there is a serious shortage of individuals who can provide mental health services. Thus, the program is designed so that trained facilitators or paraprofessionals (not necessarily only psychologists) can run the program.

The Need for Flexibility. The program recognizes that there are likely differences in the conditions of survivors after the emergency phase. Thus, rather than being a standard, one size-fits all program, it is designed such that each module can stand alone or be combined with others – depending on the needs of a particular group of survivors (2015: 1).

This manual confirms the importance of group culture and collective action (bayanihan) in methods of healing. It also adds a very important facet of Filipino reality: the presence of poverty, as alluded to in the second and third items. It is thus a resilience package that takes into consideration the local socio-political situation.

Furthermore, the work also recognizes two characteristics that I have not seen a lot in Western trauma literature: “that spirituality is an important source of strength among Filipinos and is what sustains them in times of crisis” (2015: 2). ¹⁷ It also identifies how “humor and laughter contribute to the indomitable Filipino spirit” (Ibid.).

Aside from enlarging the scope of coming-to-terms with the past, the postcolonial turn in Trauma Studies also tries to consider possible paradigms other than the Holocaust. While maintaining the gravity of the Holocaust and the constant need to commemorate its victims, I find it interesting to note that a critic, such as Jeffrey Alexander in The Meanings of Social Life, asks the following question: “Is the Holocaust Western?” (2003: 83) In other parts of the world, he acknowledges, the Holocaust is not a common reference of the Second World War (2003: 83). In Southeast Asia, for example, “Hiroshima” and “Nagasaki” or the Japanese Occupation might be the more prominent traumatic references evoked. In Stef Craps’ analysis of Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay, for example, he observes how “the Holocaust is not a major concern of people in India, if they are aware of it at all” (2013:116). Similarly, Andreas Huyssen points out the risk of the Shoah serving as screen memory, “either enabling a strong memory discourse and bringing a traumatic past to light or blocking any such public reckoning by insisting on the absolute incommensurability of the Holocaust with any other historical case” (2003: 99).

Indeed, at the beginning of World War II, the “Holocaust” was not yet as we know it now. When the concentration camps were discovered by the Allies in 1945, these were first seen as “atrocities,” among others. Interestingly, the term used, “atrocities,” according to Alexander, first described the Japanese brutalities in the Philippines (2003: 28). Therefore, before it had become a paradigm of trauma, the Holocaust, at one time in history, was referred to as an “atrocity” among others.

However, it is not an option to completely put aside Holocaust discourse. In this regard, the position of scholar Jo-Ed Tirol proves well-balanced: while “Filipinos may already have a working memory of the war [with a focus on] studying military chronologies, the Japanese occupation, and the road to liberation by the United States,” one should campaign for a firm anchoring of “the Holocaust as part of the Philippine experience of the Second World War” (2015: 264, emphasis mine). Tirol refers here to the Manilaners: the over 2000 European refugees who escaped the Nazi regime and welcomed by then President Manuel Quezon.

Such rescue is now documented, for example, in a film by Sharon Delmendo and Noel Izon (2013) and institutionalized by the unveiling of the Open Door Monument on June 2009 in Tel Aviv. ¹⁸ Since then, there has been an increasing interest in the rescue story which again was recently recognized through a posthumous award given by the Israel Embassy to the late Manuel Quezon last August 2015.

The word Manilaners takes on a very interesting construction with “Manila,” the Philippine capital, at its root. Habitually, a Filipino speaker would refer to himself as taga-Maynila, literally “from Manila,” the prefix taga indicating provenance. Alternatively, although Spanish is no longer spoken, one can still refer to inhabitants from the capital as Manileños or Manileñas, with the gender inflexions testifying to its Romance legacy. Indeed, one refers to someone from Madrid a Madrileño or Madrileña. Manilaners, however, exhibits another hybrid form, taking on the German suffix “–ers” in order to indicate provenance, ¹⁹ just like someone from Berlin would say: Ich bin ein Berliner. The term is an interesting witness—more, a lesson—on hospitality, in this age of different refugee crises. The Manilaners were European refugees who eventually became residents, with jobs and regular lives. ²⁰

If one can consider the construction of Manilaners as a hybrid concept, the next one certainly has journeyed and added to the “thickness” of its heritage. Travelling from its Latin American origins (Ferrandíz and Silva Barrera, 2016: 82), desaparecidos signify the Philippines’ version of the over a thousand people who disappeared starting from the dictatorial regime of Ferdinand Marcos from 1972 to 1986. Under Marcos, tortures included electric shock, serum injection, Russian roulette, beating, strangulation, water-boarding, animal treatment, burning, pepper torture, and psychological torment (Hapal, 2016).

The first documented disappearance in the Philippines was of 27-year-old Charlie del Rosario, a professor in the now Polytechnic University of the Philippines and a founding member of Kabataang Makabayan (Patriotic Youth), a national-democrat group in the 1960s (Dongal, 2012: 13). “Charlie was last seen on the night of 19 March 1971 before the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus that preceded the 1972 declaration of Martial Law by President Ferdinand E. Marcos” (Dongal, 2012: 13). When martial law was declared on the 21st of September the year after, 38 cases of enforced disappearances were documented (Dongal, 2012: 13).

However, according to the Primer on Desaparecidos-Philippines published in 2012, “unlike in Latin America, there never was an official investigation of human rights violations in the Philippines, particularly of enforced disappearances” (Dongal, 2012: 11). Moreover, the recent stealthy re-burial of Ferdinand Marcos in the Heroes Cemetery was an added slap on the families of the bereaved. How ironic to live in a time when some strongmen—like Franco—are demoted to a lesser-symbolic cemetery, while others, such as Marcos, manage to grab a place in a site of memory linked to patriotism, nation and heroism. As such, the translation of the two bodies, Franco’s and Marcos’, thus indicate the value attributed to each country’s desaparecidos. If Marcos is “now heroic,” then does this mean that those who suffered under him are renegades?

Countering such revisionism, for example, is Lualhati Bautista’s novel Desaparesidos—spelled with an “s,” now appropriated in Filipino language. Written in 2007, the story is based on the recollection of actual detainees (Doana, 2018). The novel was adapted into a play and shown in Ateneo de Manila University in 2018, thus manifesting its relevance to our times.

Through my focus of kapwa, Manilaners and desaparesidos in this third section of the study, I have tried to show the cultural importance of group culture and not only individual psychological traumatic “healing”; as well as the need for the integration of socio-economic issues in any study of memory and resilience. The existence of the Manilaners and the desaparesidos also shifts the perspective and experience of the Holocaust and the disappeared to a Filipino context.

A re-collection

At the end of this itinerary, it is good to recollect the most salient points and evaluate their relevance within Memory and Trauma Studies. As we reconsider terms such as matandà, agam and limot/limót, in which oppositions cohabit, one can be reminded of the principle of the yin and the yang, two contrary but complementary forces at work in the cosmos (Mercado, 1972: 294). Seeming opposing characteristics need not be seen as dichotomous, rather, harmonious. Interestingly, since a word can express both shuttling back between past and future (as in agam); seasonal, thus, prey to chance (as in panahon); at times remembering, at times forgetting (as in matandà and limot), they are actually more illustrative of the current perspective of movement in Memory Studies.

Unlike previous conceptions of Memory as framed or “bound,” ²¹ this present trend in memory studies favors an understanding of memory as processual, traveling, palimpsestic, discursive, and “unbound.” In her essay, “Travelling Memory,” Astrid Erll argues how travel is “an expression of the principal logic of memory: its genesis and existence through movement” (2011: 12). It is not surprising, hence, that both Memory and Translation Studies, for example, can be both explored as containment and, at the same time, as mobility, ferrying, transferring.

Regarding our present concern, certain concepts of memory and time actually represent this “principal logic of memory” (and translation) by their very definition: matandà represents both remembering and forgetting; limot/limót can signify either forgetting or gathering; agam can look towards the future or veer toward the past, and panahon, can mean time as seasonal, thus chronological, yet subject to chance. In addition, drawing again from Rovelli, time as panahon actually translates more accurately time as both non-linear and linear. Panahon thus obliges one to think chronologically and be ready for change. These words show bounded movement, and movement bounded.

Furthermore, an evaluation of trauma-related contexts reveal some significant cultural characteristics to be considered. One is reminded that the perspective of memory and time, at least in this study, comes from the Global South, especially one that shares space and time with the wrath of nature (flexibility, katatagan, agam-as-doubt and as-planning ahead, panahon-as-seasonal), and this, in a society of impunity (desaparesidos).

In matters pertaining to coming-to-terms with the past, the importance of spirituality, humour and group culture (kapwa, barangay, utang-na-loob, bayanihan, hospitality) should also be considered. This group culture can also be seen in the welcoming of the Manilaners, the over 2000 Jews who escaped Kristallnacht. The existence of the Manilaners nuances Memory Studies through a narration of the Holocaust from the point of view of the Philippines as host country under colonial rule.

Last but not the least, this article proposes the vernacular as method for cultural memory dialogue. Such a process signifies, first of all, a conscious attempt to temporarily suspend one’s habitual memory studies framework in order to apophatically listen to another’s, via language, before contextualizing this culture within the “canonized” historicity of the discipline. Rather than an essentialist perspective, this strategy aims for dialogue ²² with other cultures which are also welcomed in their own terms. Such a method would hopefully encourage other contexts and languages to adapt this bottom-up approach in view of richer dialogue and reciprocal enrichment within the field.