Waiting

Jessica Sanchez will be singing “Lupang Hinirang” in the Pacquiao Bradley fight, and it’s only fitting that the two Filipinos—or half-Filipino in the case of Sanchez—who have brought the country much honor should be thrown together for that event. Should Pacquiao win the fight—and nothing less than a thunderous performance after last year’s dismal one would constitute it—it would do wonders for Pinoy pride. And Pinoy unity, if only for a day.

But their coming together also offers an ironic commentary on our tendency at home and abroad to look down on blacks—a thing that has climbed several notches higher with Pacquiao fighting Timothy Bradley, and on the horizon Floyd Mayweather—when we have so much in common with them. I say “blacks” rather than “African-Americans” because it is not their nationality or ethnicity we deride, it is the color of their skin. I remember again how Filipinos went for Hillary Clinton rather than Barack Obama in the primaries because as a Pinoy living in the West Coast told me, “Yayabang lalo ang mga itim.” A thing no Pinoy has ever said about a white candidate: “Yayabang lalo ang mga puti.”

Quite incidentally, I’ve often wondered how Harry Thomas is doing as ambassador to the Philippines. I’ve always thought it was an inspired move for the Obama government to assign an African-American to its embassy in Manila. I can imagine how the Filipino elite, many of them mestizo, have been having considerable attacks of schizophrenia over the last couple of years dealing with him, their absolute obeisance to American and absolute scorn for African pulling in opposite directions in their hearts or minds, such as they have them. But that’s another story.

Pacquiao and Sanchez represent the two things Filipinos have excelled at and gained international renown for—boxing and singing. It is no small irony that Sanchez should also be half-Mexican since that too is what we have in common with Mexicans. Along with the African-Americans and the Mexicans, boxing and music have been the sources of our survival, the sources of our pride. In the case of the African-Americans, they have been the sources of their liberation as well.

Boxing and singing seem the natural, instinctive, reflexive responses of the oppressed to their oppression. They certainly have been so to the blacks in America. Boxing offered the only legitimate way of hitting back at a white man, and I can imagine how the black fighters of yore applied themselves to it with vengeful passion. Muhammad Ali would of course raise it to stratospheric heights, taking on the US government itself as his greatest foe, and winning against it.

Just as well, singing was the only legitimate way a people whose tongue had been cut, and not always so metaphorically, could hear the sound of their own voices. American music is pretty much black music, and it arose from the pit of the earth, specifically from the bowels of the Mississippi Delta, originally as gospel music. Which eventually became blues, and jazz, and rock. That was the cry of the oppressed, that was the sound of chains rattling, that was the roar of a people longing to be free.

It is a sad commentary on our capacity to be divided and ruled that we tend to identify with our oppressor than with our fellow oppressed. All the more for it being based on epidermal hue. What do we think, being half-baked is better than being fully baked?

Singing was also how we survived in body and mind, how we spoke of our anguish sa loob at labas ng bayan kong sawi. The kundiman is the veritable Filipino blues, as much about unrequited love from country as from a loved one. Singing is how we continue to survive today. What’s true for our gallows humor is probably true as well for our “gallows” singing—and the karaoke is as close to gallows as they come. If we didn’t sing, as a musician friend of mine once theorized to me, we’d probably commit more murder and mayhem.

And boxing, well, that is pretty much how we’ve conceptualized ourselves, in the movies and real life, pushing our way out of the misery and darkness with our fists. Pacquiao is no fluke, though he has raised the bar on our pugilistic abilities to mind-boggling levels. There was Flash Elorde before him, as iconic a figure as he is today, and one that did wonders for Filipino pride and unity.

That is something we have in common with the African-Americans: boxing and music. Though that is also something we do not have in common with the African-Americans, who have used both not just to survive but to prevail, not just to get by but to transcend, not just to gain renown but to liberate themselves. We have yet to use both to discover our identity as Filipinos, we have yet to use both to stand in solidarity with the oppressed, we have yet to use both to shout from the mountain “I have a dream.”

I don’t know how Pacquiao will do against Bradley. He will probably win it, and win it impressively. But I do know we still have a more arduous fight ahead of us, and it will take a long while before we can win it, if we ever do. Not least because we’re not even aware to this day that we’re knee-deep in battle, and our foe, which is prejudice and bigotry, is grinding us to heel.

What can one say? The Filipino’s greatest enemy has never been the people he has fought. Like Pacquiao, we have a talent for knocking down opponents, not least the tyrants who have tried to oppress us. Like Pacquiao, our greatest enemy is ourselves.

Something to think about while—waiting.

(This column was written before the Pacquiao-Bradley fight yesterday.—ED.)