OOV Book Review

Rebirthing Our Country

A COUNTRY OF OUR OWN
Partitioning the Philippines
By David C. Martinez
Bisaya Books © 2004
Available at www.bisayabooks.com

F or better or for worse, we who live outside of the Philippines still reside along the periphery of its heart. And the country that we left behind still pulses in the rhythm of our bloodstream. Still, when we find reasons to criticize the goings-on in the homeland, aren’t we being neocolonialists? Are we not imposing our mindset on what we think is not “up to par” compared to practical values we’d come to believe as “better”? Do people back home want to say to us, or have they said to us, “Mind your own beeswax!” to phrase it in more genteel terms?

...those of us who love the Philippines must tear it apart literally into separate nations in order to save the culture, language and people to which the “fabricated state’s” central government has not effectively attended.

It is a tragedy of small consequences when one’s vision rises from the ashes of exile.

David Martinez articulates a strange and fearful vision in A COUNTRY OF OUR OWN: Partitioning the Philippines: that those of us who love the Philippines must tear it apart literally into separate nations in order to save the culture, language and people to which the “fabricated state’s” central government has not effectively attended. It is not unusual to seethe at our country, leave it and then love it with a longing, but these alone won’t bring us back towards home. We are prodigals by choice, destined to yearn for a return to the land.

Martinez writes his treatise of epiphany situated in sunny California, far from Metro Manila’s heat-caked streets amidst the 24-hour cantankerous sounds of jeepneys and motorized tricycles. But still he writes from the depths of a dungeon he experienced and now constantly carries. He is a living tree, not cut down, but torn up from his patch of ground, transplanted to a foreign domain. He is unwilling to believe he will cause no significant tremor on his countrymen’s somnambulistic state. He expostulates in true debater’s style: challenging us with facts, with lists and tables to show how countries have been reborn to their own identity after seceding from the mother nation. He rakes the past historical mishaps to expose generations of ilustrado greed and our submission to Western plundering. He outlines similar decisions by former conglomerate countries now broken into separate nations—Belgium, for one, who in the early 1830s, seceded from The Netherlands—who have developed into much stronger entities responsible to the region’s people; Bosnia-Herzegovina from Yugoslavia, and Belarus from the U.S.S.R. (52)

Martinez is succinct when he claims “we do not resemble the United States. We resemble the world’s most failed and fabricated states.” Instead, the author states that in terms of “cultural homogeneity”, the Philippines is “the world’s most culturally fractured country.” (42) (Emphasis in the original)

Partitioning the Philippines may be the first step to claiming responsibility for our culture, our language and our economic sustainability, nay, our survival without perennially blaming the central government in Manila as bottleneck to true progress.

He advances his opponents’ position in defense of a fabricated nation, comparing the Philippines to a coalition similar to that of the former Soviet Union, Yugoslavia or Indonesia. Then, with a brilliant move dipped in historical perspectives, he goes for the jugular—dispensing truths we have always known on our own, realities we have seen but never acknowledged—that the dream after all is possible (Is it?), is probable (Can it?), depending on our gut determination: a dream of "a multitude of nations each bestowed with a separate and distinctive history, culture and language." (ASIN Creed, 513)

He lists the nations-to-be: Luzon, Cordillera, the Visayas, Mindanao and Bangsamoro. A rebirth

of five historically integrated, geographically rational, politically coherent, and economically viable regions . . . becoming nations again both in character and in form, free to retrieve our plural parts, recapture our communal identities and redeem our original values. (24)

Extreme? Perhaps. Misguided? Could be. Radical? Certainly! Partitioning the Philippines may be the first step to claiming responsibility for our culture, our language and our economic sustainability, nay, our survival without perennially blaming the central government in Manila as bottleneck to true progress.

Today, we are children of the streets, savvy but amoral; concerned only with our own survival, not with that of our neighbor’s. Our politicians and statesmen are far from unique when they walk that talk, “What’s in it for me?” We profess our love for country but can we put our money where our mouth is? We demand austere morality from our leaders but we decimate our own standards to pursue the fast track and today’s dream of plenty, forgetting that credit is really debit with delusion.

All that is left for the reader when he puts down this 514-page book is to question his own doubts laced with cold fear because Martinez certainly hasn’t an iota of a doubt that his vision of separate nations of the various regions in the Philippines is key to our peoples’ survival. Our fear is that he could be right.

Prophets of doom assail us. Visionaries like David Martinez gamble their faith on our innate wisdom to take that life-altering step: to shatter our illusions and make the most of each shard, delayed as this step may be.

The author has planted a seed. Fifty years from now, what will it be? A Philippines purchased and charged on some multinational’s American Express? Or a multitude of nations separately charged with the responsibility for its own people’s abundance? (rag)

© Remé A. Grefalda

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