>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington, DC.
>> Hong Ta-Moore:
Good afternoon.
Welcome to today's lecture
titled Recovering the National
Memory: The Quest for a
Pre-colonial Filipino sponsored
by the Library of Congress,
Central [inaudible], Washington,
DC, and the Embassy of
Philippines in commemoration
of the 120th anniversary
of Philippines independence
from Spain.
My name is Hong Ta-Moore,
reference librarian
for Southeast Asia Collection.
Due to time constraints,
please hold your questions
until the Q&A portion
of today's lecture.
Also, please note that we
are recording this lecture
for webcast.
So by asking questions,
you are giving the Library
of Congress permission to
record you and your questions.
Lastly, please switch
your phones to vibrate
to avoid interruptions.
I would like to invite Dr.
Dongfang Shao, Where is he?
Oh, I'm sorry.
Chief of the Asian Division to
the podium to say a few words
about the Asian division.
Dr. Shao.
[ Applause ]
>> Dongfang Shao:
Good afternoon.
My name is Dongfang Shao.
I'm chief of Asian Division.
Welcome to the Library
of Congress.
We have very good privilege
to have so many people
to come today although
this is a late afternoon.
Asian Division is one
of the largest Asian collections
outside of Asian countries.
Now we have about four
million physical items
in 170 different
Asian languages.
And Asian Division
was established
in 1928 this month
by the US Congress.
So this year marks 90th
anniversary of Asian division.
So this is a good day
for celebrate our
collection for 90 years.
And Asian Division reading room
is located in Jefferson Hall
on the first floor,
the room 150.
So after lecture and Hong
Ta-Moore, we'll take some
of your, some of you to the
reading room to have a tour
and this walk's about seven
to eight minutes
from this building.
We have covered the
several 23 countries
and areas including the
East Asia, Southeast Asia,
South Asia, Mongolia, and
Tibetan language materials.
So Philippine is one of
the largest collections
in the Southeast collection.
Hong Ta-Moore later we'll
introduce our Philippine
collection and particularly
some material unique
to maybe interesting to you.
And the Library of Congress
now is trying to reach more
to public for the
outreach program like this
and I hope today's lecture
will be a successful one.
And now I turn to Hong Ta-Moore
to introduce our
Philippine collection.
[ Applause ]
>> Hong Ta-Moore:
Thank you, Dr. Shao.
This thing is way too long.
It's right in my face.
The Asian Division has
nearly 300,000 items
from Southeast Asia and
many more in other divisions
in the Library of Congress.
The materials on the Philippines
has been considered one
of the richest Filipina
collections in the North America
as a result of the
US involvement
and the Philippines since 1898.
Materials include books,
journals and newspapers, maps,
photographs, manuscripts,
government documents,
and much more.
These items are housed in
many divisions in the Library
of Congress based on formats
but those that are published
in the US, they are
often acquired
through copyright deposits.
For those materials
published in the Philippines
or in Southeast Asia,
they are acquired
by our overseas office
located in Jakarta, Indonesia.
The Jakarta office is supported
by a [inaudible] office
in Manila that was
created in the early '90s
to ensure maximum
efficiency and timeliness
in acquiring materials
from the Philippines
such as those written by the
speaker of today's lecture.
We have some of his books on
display in the back of the room.
Please feel free to peruse them
at the conclusion
of the lecture.
Now for the main
event, we are honored
to have Mr. Virgilio
Almario here today.
Mr. Almario holds a distinctive
and prominent position
in Filipino literature.
He is an authoritative
figure and advocate
of the national language
and language nationalism.
He was proclaimed national
artist for literature in 2003.
Within and outside [inaudible]
journalism, publishing,
and cultural management,
Mr. Almario exerted
leadership and influence.
His literary vision manifested
not just in his own writing
but extended to his other
vocations: mentoring,
spotting the rough literary
talent, and helping to polish it
by critical motivation,
encouragement, publishing
and general advocacy
for culture.
Currently he is the chairman
of the National Commission
for Culture and the Arts,
the Official Arts Council
for the Philippines.
He also leads the Komisyon
sa Wikang Filipino.
I'm sorry if it butchered
that, or commissioned
on the Filipino language
which is the sole constitutional
authority under the Office
of the President
charged with developing
and promoting the
national language
and overseeing its enrichment
through research publication
and its continuous development.
Without further ado, please
join me to welcome Mr. Almario.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
>> Virgilio S. Almario: Thank
you so much, Mr. Hong Ta-Moore,
Dr. Dongfang Shao, Chief
of the Asian Division,
my friends from the
Philippines headed
by Director Barnes
[assumed spelling]
of the national museum,
guests, ladies and gentlemen.
Let me begin by reading
to you a poem of mine.
It is in Filipino, the national
language, and I'd you to hear
at least how it sounds
in the original.
I'm providing an English
translation, of course,
which you can see
on the PowerPoint.
The title of the poem is
"Ang Bangkay, The Corpse."
Here is the poem.
[ Foreign Language Spoken ]
Now you will certainly ask,
what has a corpse got to do
with Philippine culture.
"The Corpse" is not a
symbol of the country
because our country now I would
like to believe is very
much alive or [inaudible].
"The Corpse" then
represents Filipino culture
because Filipino culture
to me is both nameless
and unrecognizable
to many Filipinos.
It has been stranded somewhere
in the isolated beaches
of memory and no one
remembers how it looks,
much less what it is, its
essence, its form or shape,
how it feels to be touched,
a storm head west
the corpse ashore.
And there has been
several storms that blew
over the Philippines, the storms
of falling cultures imposed
by its colonizers
that practically
obliterated any trace
of what the Filipino has been
before they were intervened
and reconstituted its
consciousness and memory.
His consciousness and memory
in its present amorphous,
if not much adulterated form.
If we go by Benedict
Anderson's notion of an Asian
and its culture as, and I
quote, "an imagined community,"
who will now imagine the
Filipino nation and its culture
if it doesn't even recognize
its remains was [inaudible]
and isolated shore.
I believe that each generation
will somehow re-imagine its own
nation, rebuild it
in its own memory,
and its own likeness as it were.
The first persons to imagine
a Filipino nation were the
revolutionists of the
19th century starting
with the propaganda movement
that demanded reforms
from the Spanish center
of government in Madrid
and which graduated into
a revolutionary movement
of the Katipunan that sought
to overthrow the
colonial government.
While the Katipunan
and the emergence
of nationalism took inspiration
from or was triggered
by the novels of Jose
Rizal, "Noli Me Tangere"
and "El Filibusterismo."
I hope you have copies
of these books
by Jose Rizal in
your collection.
Andres Bonifacio and es
Katipunan sought deeper roots
in their concept of [foreign
language] or Motherland.
The pre-colonial motherland
embodied the ideals
of the movement as proclaimed
in its Kartilya or its charter
or in the revolutionary essay
of Andres Bonifacio [foreign
language spoken] or in English,
"What Every Tagalog
Should Know."
In character and spirit, the
Katipunan and its imagining
of our nation was
anti-colonial and anti-feudal.
The revolution was aborted
because it was taken
over by the feudal lords or
[inaudible] and educated class
that rested its leadership
from Bonifacio who wanted it
in Tagalog and not in Spanish.
With the assassination
of Andres Bonifacio,
after [inaudible]
trial, the new leaders
of the revolution established
the Malolos Republic,
which in turn was
[inaudible] by the Americans.
Even under the leadership of
the learned and educated class,
the Philippine Revolution
was already on the verge
of victory over Spain.
But Spain sought to save
face, [inaudible] battle
with General Dewey in Manila
Bay so that Spain did not have
to surrender to its
former colonial subjects
but to the new colonial
power, the Americans.
Through the Treaty of Paris,
Spain sold the Philippines
to the United States
for $20 million.
So what in fact is a
Filipino culture to speak
of after these colonial storms?
Our generation or even more
preferably the generations
after us must dare to dream,
to re-imagine our nation.
Revolutions are mainly physical
events while colonization
is cultural.
The task for the
cultural sector especially
under the leadership now of the
National Commission for Culture
and the Arts is to have a
more direct and active role
in the act and process of
national re-imagination.
It must wield its
various educational tools
and cultural instruments
and provide foundations
to the execution of its
mandate to make culture part
of the mainstream
of nation building.
The education of the
Filipino into someone capable
of re-imagining himself and
the nation entails a revisiting
of Philippine history
but, sadly,
the only Philippine history
we know dates back from 1521
when Ferdinand Magellan
supposedly discovered
the Philippines.
But what history is history
from the Western point
of view, pre-colonial history?
What we need is a native
non-colonial Filipino history.
Archeologists, for example,
have discovered the remains
of an ancient Filipino from
60,000 to 30,000 years ago
in a cave, in Tabon
cave in Palawan.
The most recent archeological
diggings in Kalinga Province
in the Cordilleras even
show that humans were
in the Philippines as
early as 709,000 years ago.
But even if we record only from
the dating of the Tabon man,
we need to recover
our historical memory
for at least 28,000 years.
We must be able to retrace
our steps to the time
when ancient Filipinos
discovered the Philippines,
not a Portuguese name Magellan.
If we must recover this lost
memory, we must study, preserve,
and safeguard our
intangible cultural heritage.
Right now, heritage preservation
in the Philippines focuses
mainly on built heritage,
the tangible cultural
heritage that comes
from our colonial past.
Surely, the earthquake
broke our Spanish churches,
the area with the sturdy
Antillean architecture
of our [inaudible] to mention
a few, our valuable relics
and repositories of
our colonial past.
But again, the memory we
must recover does not reside
in these relics.
We must rediscover
our lost memory.
And we can only rediscover
our lost memory
in the intangible part of
our heritage: in the legends,
the epics, the folktales, the
[inaudible], the proverbs,
the [inaudible] of the
culture which are all clear
of colonial residue and the
main medium for such items
of culture is language.
Language is the repository of
ancient history and culture,
and the carrier of the special
perspectives of the speakers
of the language themselves.
Ironically, again, the
present and conventional method
of research and recovery is to
translate the recovered epics,
legends, folktales,
proverbs into English and not
into the national language or
in any major Filipino language.
Moreover, the interpretation
and analysis must either be
in Filipino or in any
major Filipino language.
Filipinos are the first
and direct beneficiaries
of cultural research,
not the foreigners.
To translate the said
cultural materials
from the vernacular originals
into English is to deny
or further obscure their essence
and what results is not the
rediscovery of our identity
but more negation of it.
What we get is not
a re-imagined nation
but often a distorted image,
the illusion of a nation.
To fully and properly
recover our lost memory,
we need to gather, collect,
and document our
intangible cultural heritage
with a firm national and
nationalist orientation.
And this is instead
of the usual regional
and parochial orientation
[inaudible] as Filipinos.
The target benefit should
be the reconstitution
in the national imagination and
this requires the inward looking
and internal revolution
which was championed
by our heroes Andres Bonifacio
and Apolinario Mabini.
For example, in introducing his
"The True Decalogue"
[foreign language],
Apolinario Mabini said,
"To be able to establish
the true structure
of our social regeneration,
it is necessary for us
to change radically, not
only our institutions,
but also our ways of
living and thinking.
It is important to undergo an
internal and external revolution
at the same time;
it is necessary
to establish a more solid
basis for moral education
and to foreswear the vices
that we have inherited
from the Spaniards."
We must look everywhere then
to gather historical as well
as cultural documents that is
a part from internal, social,
anthropological research.
We must even enroll the help
of our former colonizers,
including the Library of
Congress in the United States.
The United States
holds considerable
and significant Filipino
historical documents
and we must seek
their assistance
in assessing these
documents of our memory.
We must speak up where our
earlier scholars left off.
Cesar, I don't know if you have
heard of him, Cesar Adib Majul
who wrote an extensive
history of Muslim Philippines
in the 1960s and
Teodoro Agoncillo
who asserted the nationalist
independent thought
that was [inaudible]
in the building
of a robust national identity.
Thus, we must keep
revisiting the works
of our outstanding historians
like Renato Constantino,
our cultural anthropologists
like F. Landa Jocano,
Florentino Hornedo, among others
and including the
pioneers H. Otley Beyer
and William Henry Scott.
We must look everywhere
for throughout all
of we must look intently inside
for that is the only
way we can recover
from the cultural amnesia
colonization has inflicted
upon us.
Frantz Fanon said that the
worst devastation visited
by colonialism upon the
colonized is not the sapping
of a nation's natural wealth.
Yes, the sapping of
natural wealth is fatal
and debilitating.
But the ultimate crime
for him is the sapping
of the national memory.
And that is done
through the substitution
of the colonizers' culture
over the native one.
Through various devious methods
of education and re-orientation,
the colonizers made to forget
his history and native culture
and learn to love instead
his master's culture.
And why? Because a person
without memory is a person
without pride and, thus,
much easier to enslave,
much easier to subjugate, and
would tend to be always owed
by the superiority of
his master's image.
Thus, even when he is freed,
we will continue his
master's education
and feel inferior to him.
A man without memory is a man
with a deep inferiority complex.
A nation without memory
is a nation without pride.
The Philippines is no different
from all the former colonies
liberated in the 20th century
that suffer from a deep and
miserable cultural amnesia.
To overcome this
cultural amnesia,
we must go the same route of
re-education and re-orientation
through and into our
own culture and history.
What we need for the Philippines
now is not a political agenda,
but what we need is a
new cultural agenda.
We must orchestrate the
execution of the mandates
of our cultural agencies
and they're the umbrella
of the national commission
for culture and the arts
from the National Archives
to the National Historical
Commission, from the Commission
on the Filipino Language
through the National Museum
and the Cultural Center
of the Philippines.
You know, the month of May
has been designated National
Heritage Month
under proclamation number
439 of the year 2003.
This year, the National
Heritage Month was launched
in the southern city of Davao,
on the island of Mindanao.
In opening the celebrations,
I said we need
to celebrate our
national heritage
in whatever shape it is,
even how small, splintered,
fragmented, or distorted it is
because we want to remember.
And we want to remember
because we want
to recover our memory
of our past.
We want to recover our
memory because we want
to rediscover our pride,
our more glorious identity
as Andres Bonifacio [inaudible]
while instigating our national
revolution against colonialism
so that we can chart a clear
and more vigorous
direction for our future,
[inaudible] our national
destination and destiny.
And "The Corpse" after
all, tossed up by the sea
in some isolated shore
need not be revived.
It has been consumed and
desiccated by the elements.
It might be after
all the remains
of our reconstructed
colonial memory
or un-reconstructed
colonial memory.
What the corpse needs is a
resurrection and transformation
through the re-infusion of the
lifeblood of national memory.
As it is reconstituted with
our true heritage and memory,
we will begin to
understand it's wholeness.
We will begin to know again
and assert its name, Filipino.
Maraming salamat po.
Thank you for your time.
[ Applause ]
Do I stay up for
[inaudible] or do I stay here?
>> Hong Ta-Moore: I was going
to ask about or say something.
Thank you, Mr. Shao,
for the wonderful talk.
This is the time for Q&A.
Does anybody have any
questions for chairman ?
Now is the time.
>> Dongfang Shao:
There is one there.
>> I do not have question
but I'd like to thank you
for [inaudible] and
referring to Frantz Fanon.
Most of us who study
African civilizations
and African-American history
rely upon him for direction
and much of what you have said
today is the work that is going
on within the African-American
community in trying
to recover our history as well.
So I thank you very much.
>> Dongfang Shao: Thank you
for appreciating my
citation from Frantz Fanon.
I love him.
Yes, sir.
>> Would you care to comment
on how colonial influences have
affected Philippine culture
over the years you've
had a long period
under Spain, Catholicism -- -
>> Dongfang Shao:
Three centuries.
>> And then you had
the American influence.
>> Dongfang Shao: More
than half a century.
What could be your
question, sir?
>> The question is how
do you access the impact
of those foreign cultures
on Philippine society:
positive, negative, neutral?
>> Dongfang Shao: I would
not say positive or negative
or neutral but in my
talk now, what I tried
to emphasize is the
more negative impact
on our consciousness.
As I quoted from Frantz Fanon,
any kind of colonization
that happened from the 18th to
the, from the 17th to the 19th
or event 20th century is a
kind of, it's a very bad kind
of experience because
it does not only result
to the abuse [inaudible]
and economically
of the colonized country
but also in the what he said
as the sapping of national
memory and that's the worst kind
of effect colonization makes
towards all the colonized
countries of the world,
especially in Asia,
Africa, and South America.
But it doesn't also mean that
we did not get some benefits
from colonization.
>> Hong Ta-Moore:
Any more questions.
Thank you very much.
>> Dongfang Shao: Salamat.
Thank you very much.
[ Applause ]
>> This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc.gov.
