A HERITAGE OF SMALLNESS

By Nick Joaquin

The national heritage is a heritage of smallness

-

Heritage: something we inherited from a previous generation [implies

that no outside force (e.g. Spanish) influenced our inability to sustain the
big effort]
Barangay/balangay is a small boat; barrio is a small locality; sari-sari
store is a small stall selling tingi products, the smallest degree of retail;
industry and way of living follows isang kahig, isang tuka concept.
o isang kahig, isang tuka Ang kita sa isang araw ay sapat
lamang para sa isang araw na pangangailangan; living one day at a
time
o tingi one stick of cigarette, half a head of garlic, small sachets
Buying small portions repeatedly, instead of buying bulk
in one go; a tactic to just survive everyday
Mirrors the financial status of most people in the country
Barangay (aka Barrio)
o 30-100 families
o Shows our tendency to petrify in isolation instead of
consolidating; to split smaller like an amoeba instead of growing
like a seed.
o The moment a town gets too big, its splits into towns
o Our excuse/apologia: alleged difficulty of administering so huge
an entity
States in America are much larger but they can manage
and are not complaining
The amount of effort we spend seems out of proportion to the returns; we
work more but make less.
o We have the habit, whatever our individual resources, of thinking
poor, of thinking petty

However far we go back in our history its the small we find

-

Many little efforts, however perfect each in itself still cannot equal one
single epic creation.
We would deliberately limit ourselves to the small performance.
o This attitude explains why were finding it so hard to become a
nation.
Used only to the small effort, we are not as a result capable of sustained
effort and lose momentum fast (ningas cogon)

Ningas-kugon: sa una lang masigasig, maganda o magaling ngunit

sa kalaunan ay hindi na naitutuloy ang nasimulan .
Our pattern of averting large venture, big risks and bold extensive
enterprises may have been set by the migrations
o We try to equate the odyssey of the migrating barangays with that
of the Pilgrim Fathers of America
One was a voyage across an ocean into an unknown
world; the other was merely going to and fro among
neighboring islands
Exhibits of Philippine artifacts with items that show our cultural heritage
confirm that it has been our nature to think and act small.
1. The Filipino works best on a small scale
o Tiny figurines, small pots, filigree work in gold or silver
o We feel adequate to the challenge of the small, but are
intimidated by the challenge of the big
2. The Filipino chooses to work with soft, easy materials
o Clay, molten metal, tree bark, vine pulp, softer woods/stones
o We feel equal to the materials that yield but evade the
challenge of materials that resist
3. The Filipino tends to rut and be complacent once it has mastered a
material, craft or product; dont move on to a next phase
o Native art of pottery declined when the Chinese introduced
porcelain
No effort was seen to master, or even outdo the arts
of the Chinese
The native pot got buried by Chinese porcelain, as
Philippine tobacco is still being buried by blue seal.
Our cultural history, rather than a cumulative development, seems mostly a
series of dead ends
o Fear of moving on to a more complex phase
Ex. Santos (saint figures)
We achieve perfection in making santos out of wood,
but we could not achieve the same perfection with
more difficult materials such as marble and bronze
o Fear of tools
Ex. Wheel in pottery; plow in agriculture
Wheel and plow had to come from outside
because we always stopped short of
technology
o The iron law of life: Develop or decay.
o

By limiting ourselves to the small effort, we make ourselves less and less
capable of even the small thing as the fate of the pagan potter and the
Christian santero should have warned us.
o Philippine movies
Looking more and more primitive as the rest of the
cinema world speeds by on the way to new frontiers
Our excuse/apologia: We have to be realistic; were in
the business of making art, not money.
o Philippine literature
Defined by and identified with the short story
The small literary form is as much as we feel equal to
o Philippine transportation
The problem of modernizing our systems of transportation
is a problem so huge we hide from it in the comforting
smallness of the jeepney
So little a land as ours shouldnt be too hard to connect
with transportation but we get crushed in small
jeepneys, killed on small trains and drown in small boats.
Is even the building of sidewalks too herculean a task for
us?
o Philippine architecture
With population swelling, there should be an upward
thrust in architecture but we continue to build small, in our
timid two-story fashion.
Flat and frail, our cities indicate our disinclination to make
any but the smallest effort possible.
It wouldnt be so bad if our aversion to bigness and our clinging to the
small denoted a preference for quality over bulk; but the little things we
take all forever to do too often turn out to be worse than the massproduced article.
o Our excuse/apologia: Mass production would ruin the quality
of our products
o Arguments against technological progress, like the arguments
against nationalism, are possible only to those who have already
gone through that stage so successfully they can afford to revile it.

For the present all we seem to be able to do is ignore pagan evidence

and blame our inability to sustain the big effort on our colonizers.
-

Our claim: Our colonizers crushed our will and spirit; our initiative and
originality to the point where inferiority has become part of our nature

Colonialism is not uniquely our ordeal but rather a universal experience.

o The Jews and all the havoc in their long history of woe merely
toughened them up
o Spain was 800 years under the Moors, but what should have been
a thoroughly crushed nation got up and conquered new worlds
instead
o Bottomline: our inclination to the small should not be blamed to
our colonizers, because it has been present in our country and
thriving in our countrymen ever since.
o If it be true that we were enervated by the loss of our primordial
freedom, culture and institutions, then the native tribes that were
never under Spain and didnt lose what we did should be showing
stronger will, spirit, initiative and originality and having richer culture
and greater progress than the Christian Filipino. Do they? No.
An honest reading of our history should rather force us to admit that
it was the colonial years that pushed us toward the larger effort.
o There was actually an advance in freedom, organization of towns
and provinces, and an influx of new ideas.
As wheel and plow set us free from a bondage to nature,
so town and province liberated us from the bounds of the
barangay.
o The liberation we experienced during our colonial years can be
seen from:
Comparing our pagan with our Christian statuary
What were once static and stolid are now dynamic
in motion and expression
Soar of our architecture
Stone bridges that unite
Irrigation dams that give increase
Adobe church that identifies

Glimpses of a heritage of greatness

1. The defense of the land during two centuries of siege
a. 50-year war with the Dutch in the 1600s
b. We held our own against the mightiest naval in the world at that time
c. Our tremendous effort created an elite vital to our history: the CreoleTagalog-Pampango principalia which was a nation-in-the-making
i. Defended the land and ruled it together during the centuries
of siege

d. From here flows the heritage that would flower in Malolos, for
centuries of heroic effort had bred, in the Tagalog and the Pampango,
a habit of leadership, a lordliness of spirit.
2. Propaganda Movement
a. Began as a Creole campaign against the Peninsulars
b. Turned into the nationalist movement of Rizal and Del Pilar
c. A further annulment of the tradition of timidity
d. Rizal was set to prove that the Filipino could tackle the big things; the
complex job.
3. The Revolution
a. This epic of 1896 is indeed a great effort but by a small minority
b. The Tagalog and the Pampango had taken it upon themselves to
protest the grievances of the entire archipelago
c. In Cavite, an army with officers, engineers, trenches, plans of battle,
and a complex organization
i. Unlike the Katipunan of Bonifacio, which was large in
number but small in scope; excelled in small informal
guerilla outfits, not as a large army
d. The Revolution was the highest we have reached in nationalistic
efforts
e. But, yet again, after having attained a certain level of achievement,
we stop progressing, but instead we start regressing; ningas-kugon
strikes again.
f. The Revolution is, as we say today, unfinished.
[Link to more info regarding Propaganda and PH Revolution:
http://www.geocities.ws/kabataangmakabayan64/psr.pdf]

Parable of the Servants and the Talents

(Matthew 25:14-30)
For to him who has, more shall be given; but from him who has not, even the little he
has shall be taken away
- The enterprising servants who increased the talents entrusted to them were
rewarded by the Lord; but the timid servant who made no effort to double the
one talent given to him was deprived of that talent and cast into the outer
darkness.

CULTURE AND HISTORY

By Nick Joaquin
Potatoes are ROOTS in a deeper sense than the botanical one
- A crucial factor in the development of Europe
- Highly nourishing, cheap, grows quickly
- Rescued the European masses from age-old hunger
- Developed a studier working class
- Potatoes are to Europeans as the Spanish influences are to Filipinos
o From the potato have come such developments as industrialization,
democratization, modernization, etc.
o Potatoes are the culture and history that cannot be cancelled in a
desire to recover a former innocence
o The European opposed to potatoes who stops eating potatoes
altogether because he views it as something that tarnished a pristine
original identity, will still remain what he has become; irreversible
process
The implication is that the more we return to what is native or original, and the more
we abolish what is foreign, the more truly Filipino we become; which is not true.
- The Question of IDENTITY
o Identity is not static, but rather dynamic
We tend to regard culture and history as static happenings
We tend to believe that culture and history are mere additions
on a base original; that any new identity is subtraction
All we have to do is remove all those imposed layers and
we shall end up with the true basic Filipino identity.
The moment you add a new ingredient, the original mixture
becomes completely transformed into something different.
Culture is chemical change rather than a physical
change.
When history added, say, saltcellar, fork & spoon, beef &
cabbage, and the guisado to our culture, the identity of the
Filipino was completely transformed that there can be no
going back to a pristine original.
CULTURE & HISTORY are the flowing waters that make it
impossible to step into the same river of IDENTITY twice.
Identity is such a problem for us because we are of two minds about it.

One, we say that we must change and leave the past behind
Two, we insist that there is a fixed primeval Filipino identity to which we
must make our way back.
- The identity of the Filipino today is of a person asking what his identity is
Pre-1521 Philippines can be likened to an uncircumcised kid and our initial fetal
position in the womb
- The most shameful thing that a kid can do in tribal times is to want to return to
his former identity after having to go through rites of passage (i.e.
circumcision) already.
- The pagan tribesman and the Christian would consider a desire to return to the
fetal position shameful; a sin.
- A human being must keep growing and this process in irreversible
- Only the retarded have a fixed identity.
- To recapture our pre-1521 identity, we would first have to abolish this nation
called the Philippines
Philippines is not Maharlika or Ma-I or Three Islands
- The Chinese really knew very little about us and almost nothing about our
geography, as their old maps hilariously demonstrate
- There are not 3 island in the Philippines but over 7,000
- There is nothing inevitable about geography; Philippines was not ipso facto
the archipelago we know today; our geography was a political creation and
was still changing, or being changed, up to the 18th century.
o Philippines was never part of Asia; it was more part of the South Seas
Animist worship, cuisine, tattooing, folklore, etc.
Our true relatives are the Polynesians
- Environment is what you make of it; DESTINY is how you react/respond to
your environment.
o Identity is the history that has gone into bone and blood and reshaped
the flesh
o Identity is not what we were but what we have become and what
we are at this moment.
And what we are at the moment is the result of how we
responded to certain challenges from outside.
o If man had not been faced with problems and challenges, he would
have never become man.
o Tasaday cave-dwellers they have no history because their neverchanging environment never offers new challenges.
o In our history, each new tool, each new idea, has been a challenge
demanding a response.
Its the challenge-and-response that has shaped the Filipino

The Filipino is a product of a particular history that began in the 16 th century,

specifically 13 important events
1. The Introduction of the Wheel
2. The Introduction of the Plow
3. The Introduction of Road and Bridge revolutionized our ideas of human
habitation
4. The Introduction of New Crops like Corn, Tobacco, Camote, etc.
5. The Introduction of New Livestock like Horse, Cow, Sheep, etc.
6. The Introduction of the Fabrica signified our passage into an industrial
culture
7. The Introduction of Paper and Printing
8. The Introduction of the Roman Alphabet resulted in the birth of the
Philippine book
9. The Introduction of Calendar and Clock
10. The Introduction of the Map and the Charting of the Philippine Shape
11. The Introduction of the Arts of Painting and Architecture
12. The Introduction of the Guisado
13. The Introduction of the Bell created the beginnings of a national
community; Spain actually created a national identity where, before, there
was only a riot of identities
o These events have been affecting us since the 16th century and will
continue to affect the nation as long as there are Filipinos
o 16th and 17th centuries are the most crucial in our history; made
possible the eventual emergence of the nation called the Philippines
o By snubbing the truly important to favor the less important, we
have been developing in our people a warped view of our culture
and history.
o Introduction to a variety of crops feed sectors of the population from
food production, thus enabled them to engage in specialized tasks;
meant a shift from subsistence culture to civilization
o The Filipino, by any other name will still be Filipino, that is, the
product of a specific epoch, a particular history which veered in this
specific direction only in the 16th century
Epoch a new beginning; a new creation
Don Felipe Segundo is our Godfather
- He is our cultural godfather because the 13 epochal events occurred under his
auspices

Started the development of a national community by gathering us together

under the sound of the bell
This is the Spanish Heritage that almost never gets mentioned among us; the
average Filipino thinks that Spain brought us nothing but religion
o Guava tree came to us only with Spain
o Ipil-ipil was brought here by the galleons
o Etc. etc.

Our culture and history is a process of converting a mix of cabbages and kings into
something different
- Our identity today, though distinctly Filipino, has gone through epochal events
and was formed through our response to these epochal events. We have to give
credit to the Spanish for introducing changes and challenges to our land, but
the big chunk of the credit still goes to us, for it is we who responded to these
outside happenings, and consequently developed an identity, that is until
today, ever-growing.