A Traveller Among The Filipinos

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31730, 13 July 1968, Page 4

A Traveller Among The Filipinos

Filipinescas. Travels in the Philippines Today. By James Kirkup. Phoenix House. 176 pp. including index, 17 pp. plates, and a map. James Kirkup, an Englishman who is visiting Professor at Japan Women’s University, is obviously at home in SouthEast Asia. An unconventional traveller, Mr Kirkup has a flair for observing the unusual and sizing it up in a highly' original way. According to a Punch reviewer, “he would bring out the wanderlust in a doormouse.” This is not a run-of-the-mill travel book, but it throbs with the exotic, drab, teeming contrasts of life in the Philippines. Each city has its own particular atmosphere from Manila—loving, lively, gay, and sophisticated, to Davao—ugly, demoralised and shabby with its rash of seedy advertising. Incidents that infuriate or disgust the average tourist interest or amuse the author. Frequently accosted by males, Mr Kirkup merely commends them for their frankness. He is fascinated by the way pickpockets go about their trade and pretends not to notice the antics of a Filipino who presses up to him and while talking volubly and rolling his expressive eyes insinuates his hands into all his pockets. The dejected look on the boy’s face after a poor haul is more than the author can bear and the two end up in a snack bar drinking beer where the lad tells Kirkup about his “hobby,” expressing the wish that all bis victims were as understanding. Incidentally this young “robbing hood” never stole from the needy! A more tolerant traveller than Mr Kirkup would be hard to find and he even seems able to relax hurtling along the highway in a taxi while the driver, with one hand loosely draped on the steering wheel, gestures wildly with a cheroot, scattering ash everywhere. How many tourists would persevere with the local delicacy, balut, a lightly boiled duck egg with

i embryo? At first revolted, Mr Kirkup is soon swallowing balut. spitting out beak and feathers like a native. After the formal Japanese women, the Filipino women appear bold and almost lewd to the author. The men love finery, carrying coins in their ears both for adornment and to avoid theft, and flashing huge rings on well-cared-for hands with long polished fingernails—a sign of leisured distinction copied from the Chinese, (although they themselves discriminate against the Chinese.) All that is best in the Filipino character is shown in their music and dancing which is a combination of endurance and elegance, quick wits and nimble bodies. They are a warm easygoing race of people but for all their sunny charm they are unscrupulous and moneyconscious individuals who approach strangers with a view to seeing how much can be made out of them rather than with the pure friendliness and interest the Japanese display. Although the Filipinos would deny their “Coca-Cola

culture,” it Is sad to see how commercialised the Islands have become. The layers of culture that form the history of the Philippines is indeed complex and little of true worth appears to be left from their Spanish legacy. The deeply religious Roman Catholic faith has been replaced by an uneasy and superficially devout attitude, and the magnificence of the Spanish ecclesiastical architecture has been reduced to tawdry imitation. Mr Kirkup pins his faith on President Marcos to bring a sense of purpose to a country where lawless anarchy appears to reign. The Filipinos are crazy about education and the author visits three universities in Manila alone. Obsessed with words, the Filipinos play scrabble with such fanatical ferocity that it could almost be considered as a national pastime along with cock fighting and pelota. Journalists are outspoken and courageous, although newspapers give prominence to crime and acts of violence in lurid

accounts which offend the author's pacifist nature. Mr Kirkup's own admitted sense of remoteness and absence from reality lends a strange beauty to the panorama. Pictures that linger in the memory are those of the rice terraces at Banaue where the magnificent naked figures of the natives seem for ever etched on the skyline of their airy fields that seem to be half water, half sky, and of the still unspoilt Hundred Islands which are paradises of wild flowers, butterflies and tropical fish. “To live in the Philippines is to live in an earthly paradise—a Garden of Eden from which though one frequently falls, one is never expelled.” This book, which could be regarded as an important social documentary, will be remembered not only for the frank, often startling observations and sharp wit of the author, and the fragile beauty of the descriptive passages, but for the breadth of his understanding of a culture so alien to our own.