Finding us

This essay is as much about the title as the content. in another century, and another domain, the proper label for this rumination is: The Circumnavigation of the World and its impact on the World. Monolithic. Monumental.

The word is long—circumnavigation. Its length is symbolically close to the process it endures, the travel it promises. It is a word that reveals and conceals the good and the bad things accompanying movements of humans.

Thank god to online resources and this endeavor called the Guttenberg Project, the accounts written by Pigafetta and other writers are now available for anyone to peruse. I practically enjoy the idea that this group that was about to set a world record of finding the route around the world started from a river and stayed there for some weeks before sailing to the deeper seas. Metaphorical.

But this is not the point of my conversation with myself, a writer and a thinker, forever caught in the historicity of colonial experience.

I look back and have to confront not five years but 500 years of existence if only to make sense of what has happened to the world and to this country I call my own, and they call the Philippines.

Portugal and Spain have all the right to be jubilant about the accomplishments of Magellan (give and take the accusation of treachery from the perspective of the Portuguese) and the bravado of Juan Sebastian Elcano (Basque and Spanish)— the former led the expedition and the latter the return.

Where do we situate the Philippines in this odyssey? And in the usage of that word connoting long and arduous travel we go back thousands of years more to the Greeks. In fact, nothing is stopping us from going back or going forward. This is the only way to make sense of the Quincentennial, which now pulls us into the arms and deep embrace of two historical lovers of full contradictions.

Perhaps, we can look at maps. Maps are supposedly neutral and, freely echoing the words of the sociologist of knowledge, Peter Berger, they do not tell us where to go and why we should go there. In the years before and after the travels of Columbus, Magellan and other explorers, the world outside Europe was terra incognita. There was nothing there. The world had an edge, an end. Monsters and giant fishes waited in ambush for those daring—and dumb—enough to leave their ports of safety.

Here is where Magellan’s mind grows bigger for the world: he showed by way of the returning ship that there was a world outside. And that world outside was there all the time. This is where the remembrance of Portugal and Spain matters.

But the discovery of new lands was not random and merely exploratory. We have to give it to Europe and to these two countries, Spain and Portugal, that there were science and economics involved in their support of ships and quest for resources. In the search for gold and spices there was a need to build military might to boost what otherwise would redound to reckless adventure and proto-tourism.

In the case of Magellan, numerous scholars and writers contend that this experienced navigator was also an evangelist who had in his portfolio the desire to convert people he encountered. The Philippine case was one and here we have to rest our case.

But rest our case we cannot with the other layers of truths (and ideologies) in Magellan project. It was part of the vocabulary of the explorers and pirates of those periods to name the lands and the seas they encountered, rescue them from being incognito. Then there were two options: for them not to be like the first Man who named the animals and the plants but to be like God—the placid body of water sighted and sailed on became the Pacific Ocean, the few islands were named after a leper and, later after a King.

But let us not stop there with that philosophy of naming. Let us move on and be inspired by Søren Kierkegaard who said: “What labels me, negates me.”

The Magellanic route has confirmed the possibilities of globalization. If I were a Portuguese or Spanish, I could certainly be jubilant about this. But I am neither.

After 500 years, we are given the chance to repudiate the falsity of histories imposed upon us—that we were not discovered, that we were not civilized by anyone, and that we could not be the villains in our own narrative of heroism.

The world is listening. The world is f—king looking at us because, while we cannot claim to be part of the circumnavigation, we were an identifiable stopover, a point on the map, in fact, a graveyard of one who disrespected a village or leadership.

It has been 500 long years and here we are with our hard-earned ember trying to light a bonfire for the day we were viciously erased.