Shuttered

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the ugliest of them all?

I’ve lost count of the number of times our class on media and culture lamented over the state of our affairs.

“Our” here does not refer only to the Filipino; we have Indonesian and Indian classmates.

Yet, the mediatization of culture—a theory asserting that media frames and influences social interactions and more importantly, its discourses—illuminates issues that cannot be contained by borders of space, time, and specially constructs like culture.

In the 1800s, the English, Dutch, and Spanish colonial powers destroyed the Balangingi and Iranun people and called this act of genocide and ethnic cleansing the redemption of civilization from Muslim piracy and slave trade.

In the present, centuries later, the Christian phobia of the Moro simplifies my reaction to media reports of Islamism or Islamic militancy or fundamentalism. A complex issue is reduced to the same end of colonial campaigns: distrust the other.

Until I read James Francis Warren’s “Iranun and Balangingi: Globalization, Maritime Raiding and the Birth of Ethnicity,” my grasp of pirates was the sum of watching reruns of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” series, produced by Hollywood and inspired by the popular theme park ride in Disneyland, perhaps the most insidious culture industry of all time.

I perceive therefore I know.

I criticize President Donald Trump for banning travelers from six predominantly Muslim countries; waffling on the role of neo-Nazi groups in the Charlottesville rally that turned violent; and more recently, caving in to pressure from the Right to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) program, which may end with the deportation of undocumented immigrants.

Brought illegally to America by their parents, the so-called “Dreamers” escaped poverty, repression and threats to life but are now perceived to be rivals for jobs by blue-collar America, who compose the mass base of pro-Trump voters.

Yet, stranded for hours last Aug. 31 when the “Lakbayan” or People’s Caravan entered the University of the Philippines Diliman campus to assert the rights of indigenous peoples and the Moro people against state neglect, militarization, and other forms of oppression, I lamented my poor luck to be caught in the miserable crosshairs of history.

“To see is to know”. Snow White’s evil stepmother did not realize this; nor the Westerners gawking at the Igorots and pygmies displayed at the World’s Columbian Exposition, which adopted this motto in showcasing anthropology in 1893.

Nor will we. The mirror of our perceptions is trained on others; our eyes are shuttered from its one true reflection: ourself.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917 3226131)

* First published in the September 10, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column of SunStar Cebu, “Matamata”