edgy scroll : quotes from ghosts of manila

Manila’s aura had had something of Baudelaire’s corpse-light glowing about it: existentially exotic, morally exotic, its legs raised by the pressure of its own putrefaction ‘comme une femme lubrique.’ Yet once here she found herself being ground down by the heat, the filth, the choking traffic, the Jollibees and Pizza Huts and Dunkin Donuts of it all. What national costume there was derived from Nineteenth century Spanish dress. What national cuisine there was merely played with Spanish and Chinese dishes. The handicrafts were not as good as those of Burma or Thailand and besides, who since the death of chinoserie in Europe wanted creaky furniture made of rattan or bamboo? Or unspeakable Madonnas standing in grottoes made entirely of lacquered seashells? Nothing had prepared her for the sheer unrelieved ugliness of this city, much of which looked like a parody of the grimmer parts of Milwaukee. Yes, that was it: that the faint traces of Europe had been swamped by the worst of Pepsicolonisation. --thoughts of ysabella bastiaan, a british diplomat daughter, an archaeologist uncovering Manila’s past.


For many of them, the Philippines was simply a place where people from the developed nations to empty out their seminal vesicles, much as their government looked at poor countries generally as good places in which to dump their toxic wastes. Out of this grew the image of Weimerian moral anarchy they half expected and more than half desired: of mothers implacably half expected and more than half desired; of mothers implacably spreading their own children’s legs that the rich might more easily center. The needle’s eye.
-- thoughts of sharon, ysabella’s boss at a fictional museum, an american who has lived in manila for more than half a decade.

Ghosts of Manila (random house, 1994), is a very articulate novel with vivid descriptions and big words. If JHP, who lived two thirds of the year in RP for decades, think of the country as the foreign characters of his book do, it’s kind of frightening to venture into more stinging western views of the chaos and disarray that encapsulate our fragile democracy. But an enlightened proclivity would conjure that not much difference separate the various ethnicity of the world. Culturally, there are differences. But intelligence is universal and not skin deep. So screw the biases.