Filozofski vestnik Letnik/Volume XXIII • Številka/Number 2 • 2002 • 93-109 
P O S T C O L O N I A L S U F F E R A N C E 
PATRICK D. FLORES 
Instantiating a postcolonial rupture within the discourse of colonialism as a 
civilizing mission, Salud Algabre, a leading light of a social movement against 
the Americans in the 1930s, apprehends - or, better still, beholds - the colo-
nial church and the dominion within its pale as a "culture of terror and space 
of death:" It is an old town - a very old town. In fact, there is a golden 
bell... During summer, when the water was clear, you could see down through 
the depths, down to where it lies. The reason they disposed of it was because 
mothers - early in their pregnancy - would give birth prematurely upon hear-
ing it toll. 
One of the reasons my ancestors rebelled was to protest against the church 
that possessed that bell. When the Spaniards came they forced the people to 
build their church. Many were killed by the Spaniards - flogged to death, 
there on the shore where the church was built. (Flores, 1998) 
If we are to consider the category of aesthetics as the encounter between 
the body and the world along with the social engagement of the senses, 
Algabre's memory revises not only the imagination of colonialism, but the 
very condition of its possibility to make worlds appear; to make colonial worlds 
materialized in specific embodiments of sight ("golden bell"), sound ("toll"), 
action ("forced," "killed," "flogged to death"), and feeling ("rebelled"). This 
same memory may also "dispose o f ' colonialism in this flash recollection made 
in a summer of epiphany "when the water was clear (and) you could see down 
through the depths." Nicholas Dirks states that "if colonialism is a cultural 
formation, then also culture is a colonial formation." (Dirks, 1992) Algabre's 
narratives can speak only at once of the re-presentation of the colonial dis-
course and of its instantiation as a rupture that aborts ("give birth prema-
turely"). The colonized body prefigures termination and postness; the "colo-
nial" is always placed retroactively (Foster, 1996) and preposterously (Bal, 1999), 
under duress to renew itself at the moment of "death" on the "shore where 
the church was built." 
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PATRICK D . FLORES 
In discerning the postcolonial inflection in Philippine contemporary art, 
we read Algabre as a passage of suffering. In Algabre's fiction, colonialism is 
suffered; suffering proves to be a salient sentiment in postcolonial subject 
making. To dramatize the performance of suffering, art criticism and history 
converse with the discipline of anthropology in order to re-transact the prob-
lematic of aesthetics with a specific consciousness of "art" which reproaches 
issues on premises of distinction and discrimination. 
Theoretical Interests 
Constance Classen in the essay "Foundations for an Anthropology of the 
Senses" peels off layer after layer of impediments to the rapprochement between 
anthropology and aesthetics: the notion that senses are precultural; the pri-
macy of sight as access to the world of senses and the acme of the human 
faculties; and, the conceptual frameworks based on speech and aurality, oral-
ity and literacy or verbal skills taken as governing operations of meaning. 
Classen's critique inevitably uncovers the moral economy of aesthetics as it 
was contemplated by its founding fathers and its long line of heirs; she quotes 
Friedrich Schiller: "as long as man is still a savage he enjoys by means of tac-
tile senses."(Classen 1997, p. 405) More telling is Edward Long's observation 
that Africans' "faculties of smell are truly bestial, nor less is their commerce 
with the other sex; in these acts they are as libidinous and shameless as 
monkeys."(Classen 1997, p. 405) Surely, aesthetics as a category of experi-
ence is not simply related to the senses, or to a construction of culture or 
society; it is also, as W.J.T. Mitchell argued, when it relates to a gaze at "a 
foundational moment in the construction of the social." (Mitchell 1995, p. 
293) 
At the heart of these reconsiderations is the category of suffering as a 
conjunctional emotion that coordinates the structure of pain and is at the 
same time the structuring and structured conditions wherein pain bathes it-
self. Social anthropology has modified the terms of the debate predicating 
suffering as an agency in everyday life, rather than seeing it as an essentialist 
estimation of will. Veena Das points out that Leibniz in 1517 was the first 
scholar to systematize explanations of suffering based on the knowledge of 
theodicy, picking up the thread via Weber, who had thought of suffering as a 
God rationalization, connecting it with explanations of the unjust distribu-
tion of suffering in the world. Such mindset finds its most predictable solu-
tion in an eschatology or salvation after life, which means in death. Clifford 
Geertz sees suffering as "the experiential challenge in whose face the mean-
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POSTCOLONIAL SUFFERANCE 
ingfulness of a particular pattern of life threatens to dissolve" (Das 1997, p. 
564); as a contention therefore that seeks adjudication not in the evasion 
from suffering, but in its sustentation in religion. Its indispensability derives 
from "systems of meaning and patterns of sociality" (Das 1997, p. 564) offer-
ing itself to those who must suffer to make their lives meaningful or culturally 
intelligible. From these studies, Das argues, suffering comes into play, in a 
climate of tension, between, on one hand, its structuring power to organize 
people around moral communities in search of salvation and spiritual refine-
ment, and, on the other, with the indictment of this power; the indictments 
inflict pain through bureaucratic remedies, which in the last instance only 
supplement the lack of justice and law and therefore perform the repetition 
of its inversion. With a sensitive approach to the "political economy of injury 
and compassion" to which the lives of the amputees on the Thai-Cambodia 
border are subjected, Lindsay French comments on how theodical knowl-
edge collapsed in the face of "scarce resources and overwhelming political 
priorities," so that "suffering often seemed only to bring more suffering, in a 
downward spiral. Karma...seemed to close in on amputees with a sense of 
immutable destiny." (French 1994, p. 92) 
We venture into this territory to resettle the discussion of aesthetic pro-
duction and its semiotic habitat with its performative arena of experience. 
Das defines suffering as the "assemblage of human problems that have their 
origins and consequences in the devastating injuries that social forces inflict 
on human experience." (Das 1997, p. 571) Arthur Kleinman regards suffer-
ing as the dialectical twist to resistance (Kleinman 1995, p. 126); the resis-
tance to the practice of experience of life's flow. This disruption of well-being 
comes in the form of "contingent misfortunes, routinized forms of suffering, 
and suffering resulting f rom extreme conditions, such as survivorship of the 
Holocaust or the atom bomb or the Cambodian genocide or China's Cul-
tural Revolution." (Kleinman 1995, p. 1010) Coming from such definition, 
Das posits that suffering is socially inscribed, executed through writing, law, 
and the body. Inasmuch as suffering implicates both the self and the world, 
Das is willing to steer through the gap between private pain and collective 
good and action. In other words, while we are in favor of this idea, hoping 
that suffering may coordinate collective struggle against manifold forms of 
oppression, we must remain at the same time skeptical about how the state, 
religion, the market, and media can re-functionalised this collectivity and 
transcode it in a common sacrifice for the so-called "common good." Das 
gives us a cogent example: 
"In the case of bio-medical technologies, new and experimental tech-
nologies are often tested on such populations as terminally ill patients, prison 
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PATRICK D . FLORES 
populations, prostitutes - in other words on those who are defined as social 
waste - in the hope that the technologies would increase the well-being of 
people in the future ... lesser harm can be inflicted for future greater good. 
In giving precise definitions to harm and good, however, science and state 
may end up making an alliance in which the suffering of those defined as 
social waste is appropriated for projects of a good society in the future." (Das 
1997, p. 570) 
Still, such a predicament will not deter us f rom exploring the possibility 
of commiseration, a contentional and contested solidarity premised on 
"shared" pain. Das remarks: "In the end one can only say that while the own-
ership of one's pain rests always with oneself - so that no one speaking on 
behalf of the person in pain has a right to appropriate it for some other use 
(e.g. for knowledge, for justice, for creating a better society of the future) -
there is a way, however, in which I may lend my body to register the pain of 
the other." (Das 1997, p. 572) 
Suffering, according to Das, posits pedagogy. It is a disciplinary practice 
that deconstructs the constitution of the social mandate through acts of le-
gitimation and illegitimation in the production of labor; it is a mode of ac-
tion and practice that compels the suffering agent to prepare itself for a pos-
sible dissemination. This is the cause of suffering. Das buttresses this reflec-
tion by citing Pierre Clastres, who frames suffering sustained in torture as a 
ritual of initiation: a mark of belongingness, membership, and investiture. 
Durkheim asserts that the body is a site not only of subjection, but of its very 
subjectivity, not only of a realization of the violence, but the very stuff that 
convulses as it is "transformed violently in initiation ritual." (Das 1997, p. 565) 
Marx insisted that the "body is placed within the political economy determin-
ing the conditions under which suffering is produced and distributed." (Das 
1997, p. 566). The already quoted Durkheim, points out fur ther that suffer-
ing as an inscription in and of the subject does not flesh itself out to "repre-
sent an object, but to bear witness to the fact that a certain number of indi-
viduals participate in the same moral life." (Das 1997, p. 565) 
In this overview of recent theory on suffering, it is worth paying heed to 
Nancy Scheper-Hughes's adamantine position that suffering makes sense only 
within a cultural economy. Her study of mothers who do not weep for their 
dead children in Alto de Cruzeiro in Brazil alters our most cherished assump-
tions of "maternality," "woman ethos," and filial "bonding." She cautions us 
that the negations of these assumptions should not be seen as "unnatural, 
inhuman, or unwomanly, but rather as reasonable responses to unreasonable 
constraints and contingencies."(Scheper-Hughes 1992, p. 400) Proceeding 
from an unequivocally materialist perspective, Scheper-Hughes deals with how 
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POSTCOLONIAL SUFFERANCE 
this aspect of Brazilian culture gives importance to the conception of having 
many children that is rooted in the expectation that only few will survive, with 
investment in those with the best chance to make it. She contends that raising 
children in the eyes of Brazilian mothers is not governed by free-market mecha-
nisms which array investments in this or that child in balance sheets. Raising 
children is always seen as an act balanced against the potential for loss and 
survival, which comes to terms with the ever-present possibility of death, as a 
destiny in the ubiquity of everyday life. Crucial in her study are tropes of 
suffering and the aesthetic of confronting it, in an active negotiation of grief. 
She points out, for instance, that the dead child is transformed into an angel 
and that a belief persists that weeping delays the flight of the child from earth 
to heaven. We have to be reminded here of Fenella Cannell's probe of the 
"language of bereavement" in a Bicolano community in the Philippines, which 
posits that pity expressed in weeping, ritualistic or as individual grief, consti-
tutes danger for those who perform such an act and for those who receive it. 
The repression of weeping forms an absence of grief, while the inability to 
weep engenders illness. But, on the other hand, if grief is given full play, it 
likewise induces illness in the form of soul-loss: the person seized by grief 
becomes like the dead person. Pity, therefore, is the root of danger: "The 
dead pull the living towards them, and the living must resist."(Cannell 1991, 
p. 271) The possibility of loss, reiterated by pity and practiced in memory, is 
resisted by a form of bereavement that aims to "forget the dead, avoid their 
in tent ions , and to separate f r o m them except in occasional encoun-
ters." (Cannell 1991, p. 266) These encounters do not lead to a teleology of 
the afterlife as a final abode, but to the practice of dis-membering through 
loss, and re-membering through leaving: death is "not clearly focused on the 
afterlife," but rather on "relations between the dead and the living, between 
the permeability of barriers between the two, and the problem of achieving a 
correct separation." (Cannell 1991, p. 269) How can grieving people effect 
such a separation in the context of an encounter? Cannell suggests that pity 
can be converted through redemption and gleaned in the cult of the Dead 
Christ, which, because he "has overcome the grave"(Cannell 1991, p. 305) 
has resisted the pull of the dead and is able to negate such a danger. The 
Dead Christ, therefore, lives as a public image and transforms pity from an 
agency of danger to an agency of transformation: "It is not only a process of a 
devotional contract.. .in which the sharing of suffering produces the return 
gift of healing; it is also a process of mangarog, of becoming like Christ, Mary 
and the other figures, taking on their clothes, gestures and words, and so 
transforms oneself." (Cannell 1991, p. 306) 
Kleinman strikes the vital vein of this survey of anthropological literature 
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PATRICK D . FLORES 
on suffering with the politics of experience, which is the "felt flow" of the 
"intersubjective medium of social transactions in local moral words." (Kleinman 
1995, p. 97) Kleinman, in his reflection on the intersubjectivity of experience 
and local moral worlds, which pertain to a universe of certain claims to hu-
man dignity, has even extended the reframing of culture as a logic of experi-
ence to the germane issue of practice and ideological intervention. Defining 
suffering as "the result of the processes of resistance (routinized or cata-
strophic) to the lived flow of experience," (Kleinman 1994, p. 174) Kleinman 
reconsiders the term resistance as a "weapon of the weak" and opens it to the 
charge of multiple energies. Swinging from the register of passive resignation 
ordained by theodical knowledge to the partisan acknowledgement of bear-
ing pain as packing the power to disconfirm prescribed "cures" of different 
forms, allows Kleinman to argue that suffering as "resistance," along with its 
intersubjective experience, can be "so various, so multileveled, so open to 
original inventions that interpreting it solely as an existential quest for mean-
ing, or as disguised popular critique of dominant ideology, notwithstanding 
all the moral resonance of those foci, is inadequate." (Kleinman 1994, p. 190) 
In Philippine scholarship, a modest contribution is foregrounded by 
Reynaldo Ileto's resourceful interpretations of the culture of Christ's passion 
and how it is reread as a narrative of revolution, as a "grammar of dissent." 
From his watershed work Pasyon and Revolution to more recent reflections on 
the martyrdom of Benigno "Ninoy" Aquino, the husband of former President 
Corazon Aquino, who put an end to the dictatorial regime of Ferdinand 
Marcos, Ileto talks about the politics of pity and commiseration (damay) as it 
acquires local accountability in a specific struggle. Ileto's exploration of the 
term damay qualifies suffering as a post-colonial idiom that stirs the people or 
community in, quoting a metrical romance or awit, "pathetic weeping, tears, 
sighs, and dying of the country." (Ileto 1977, p. 129). Such grief or dusa mobi-
lizes feeling to take action, to act on, "in a rushing manner," the condition 
that makes grief possible. Damay, therefore, becomes "a social experience, a 
Katipunan (collective) experience. Since damay is a manifestation of whole 
and controlled loob (inner sense), the Katipunan's loob radiates heat and flame, 
just as Christ and other individuals of exemplary loob radiate liwanag 
(light)."(Ileto 1977, p. 136) The reappropriation of Christ as a suffering agent 
constructs the practice of the sufferant or Christ's co-sufferer; in this case the 
struggling post-colonial subject of the Katipunan participates in suffering, 
remaking the pasyon, or Passion of the bayan (nation). 
In this brief review of the literature, we have sought to demonstrate the 
polyphonic conversation between suffering and an aspiration to address cer-
tain obligations of kinship with an aesthetically produced agency like an other, 
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POSTCOLONIAL SUFFERANCE 
a god, or a nation. In the domain of art, such a network of signals creates 
access toward the reconception of pain or onus that is shared in the private/ 
public sphere as a matter of the collective ritual of restitution. The work of 
Das on how women in India interpose institutional claims by performing their 
pain in public by way of mourning is very helpful: 
"In the genre of lamentation, women have control both through their 
bodies and through their language - grief is articulated through the body, for 
instance, by infliction of grievous hurt on oneself, 'objectifying' and making 
present the inner state, and is Finally given home in language. Thus the trans-
actions between body and language lead to an articulation of the world in 
which the strangeness of the world revealed by death, by its non-inhabitabil-
ity, can be transformed into a world in which one can dwell again, in full 
awareness of a life that has to be lived in loss. This is one path towards healing 
- women call such healing simply the power to endure." (Das 1996, p. 69) 
Annie E. Coombes, meditating on the aesthetic of incarceration and de-
tention in contemporary art making, suggests that one way of achieving well-
being is by overcoming trauma, which is re-expressed in the material form of 
"art." Quoting research on trauma (Felman and Dori Laub), she posits: "As a 
way of 'mastering' trauma the survivor needs to objectify it and that this can 
only occur 'when one can articulate and transmit the story, literally transfer it 
to another outside oneself and then take it back again, inside.' Thus we may 
be unwittingly become a step on the road to translating traumatic memory 
into narrative memory through our uncomfortable viewing of this collection 
of objects-becoming-exhibits and the unbearably poignant testimony to which 
we necessarily give witness." (Coombes 2000, p. 52) 
Based on this research, I will chart our investigations on Philippine con-
temporary art as a body of work, a corpus of feelings, an ecology of agencies 
and reciprocities, following as well what Salud Algabre called a disposition. 
Devotion to Nation 
The Philippines commemorated its national centenary from 1996 to 1998, 
celebrating the revolution against Spain and against the American imperial-
ist interlude of half a century thereafter, as well as exposing the continuing 
struggle against varied forms of hegemonic presence in the country. Such 
attempt at reckoning the revolution in light of sustained nation-building 
projects in the time of globalization refers to the colonial discourse and its 
attendant historiography as a way of controlling imagination. Ileto, describ-
ing his unsettling feeling as he witnessed the massive throng that flocked to 
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the centennial spectacle on Independence Day in June 1998, captures this 
post-colonial nostalgia for Hispanic history: "Milling through the crowds that 
threatened to block the passage of the floats up Roxas Boulevard, I felt there 
was something familiar about the event. Could it be the national version of the 
many religious processions I had seen in Manila - the procession of the Black 
Nazarene immediately came to mind - and in the provinces particularly during 
holy week? Just as the story of Christ unfolds in Good Friday processions, the 
grand parade reiterated the dominant narrative of the Filipino nation."(Ileto 
1998, pp. 239-240) This calvaric aesthetic that choreographs processions in 
Philippine life is best caught in the centennial mural of Antipas Delotavo, which 
stages a march of struggle through history, leaving in its wake death and set-
back, but ever advancing toward an unfinished revolution. We thus stage at the 
outset the encounter between the modernity of nation, on the one hand, and 
the postcolonial critique that makes it possible, on the other. 
This parade to which Ileto refers - who has studied the local narration of 
Christ's passion and reads into it a revolutionary, due to salvational/salvific 
reasons, Utopia - took place after the election of Joseph Estrada, a movie star 
who became the country's centennial and millennium President. Estrada was 
deposed in the year 2001 through an uprising supported by the military es-
tablishment. The central place of the revolt was a Catholic monument called 
the EDSA Shrine, which was built in memory of the 1986 upheaval that toppled 
almost two decades of the infamous Marcos regime. The symbols of the anti-
Estrada protest were decidedly Catholic; the stage, which was the site of fiery 
speeches - prayers and masses led by priests and nuns, and the oath-taking of 
President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo - denouncing the massive corruption and 
amorality of Estrada, was set against a gargantuan sculpture of the Virgin 
Mary. Months later on the evening of Estrada's arrest, millions stormed the 
same shrine but in support of a fallen leader; the Catholic church felt that the 
presence of Estrada loyalists from the poor urban regions desecrated the holy 
ground. The seemingly absent Catholic representatives from this "other" 
largely mass-based mobilization was very telling, but is a story that properly 
belongs to another essay. What is significant to note in these two cases of 
"people power," as this is termed in the Philippines, is the denial of the Catho-
lic, evocatively colonial sign system, to legitimize or delegitimize initiatives of 
social movements. 
In the context of the agenda of rendering these particular events aes-
thetically possible, tropes, or figurative devices, articulated in an expressive 
discipline and through a technology of meaning making, mark the colonial 
moment and pursue its specters. This paper also discusses the production of 
these tropes in contemporary Philippine art. 
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POSTCOLONIAL SUFFERANCE 
Amid the frenzy of staging the centenary, the Generalitat Valenciana of 
Spain organized a travelling exhibition of contemporary visual arts seeking to 
reflect on the fallout of the Spanish Empire when it lost the colonies of Cuba, 
the Philippines, and Puerto Rico in 1898. The project was specifically signifi-
cant for the Philippines as its current culture was placed against various streams 
of criss-crossing interactions with the Hispanic Empire in the Americas, the 
Caribbean colonial ideology, and the Southeast Asian indigenous and mod-
ern histories. 
The guiding line of the curatorial endeavor of the exhibition, entitled 
Cien Anos Despues (One Hundred Years After), was the interpretation of the "loss" 
of the "colonies" in the particularly vital contexts of an emergent U.S. imperi-
alism, along with present-day socialist societies and within a climate that pre-
serves colonial tradition, sustained by a wide range of forces from religion to 
a globalist mass media. All these proceed, however, along with a determinate 
and discernible postcolonial imagination that grapples with both, the reten-
tion of coloniality, as a material condition, and the rupture of resistance against 
it, seen as a t ransformative aspiration. Surely, the "post" in the term 
postcolonial prefigures a terminal as well as a contingent continuity, as the 
term post may mean something "rear" or "later." 
The colonial thus posits a limit that may come in discrepant forms as an 
ant i /post colony, protectorate, or nation; the different political experiences 
and artistic expressions of artists from the three former Spanish colonies track 
precisely these traces of colonial destiny; the "empire" contracts along with a 
lack or an incompletion that is condensed in the act of the "mother country" 
leaving her children who had been reared for a long time on progress and 
civilizational missions; contemporary Spanish art, which was the part of the 
exhibition, had to wrestle with this de-
mon of "loss and leaving," and this is 
probably why there was melancholia in 
this sort of ambivalent dispossession, as 
well as rightful indignation against ineq-
uity and struggle for freedom. 
From the art projects of the Filipino 
artists in the exhibition - Santiago Bose, 
Imelda Cajipe-Endaya, Alfredo Esquillo, 
Jr., and Manuel O c a m p o - w e can sketch 
out the content and contour of the con-
temporary colonial aesthetic as embod-
ied in the work of other Philippine art-
ists. This coloniality is shaped by various 
Manuel Ocampo, Abstract Painting 
(1996) 
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PATRICK D . FLORES 
discourses: the Hispanic conquest of the Philippines for about 400 years and 
the subsequent American occupation until 1945; the Southeast Asian culture 
that negotiated the conquests; the folk articulation of that negotiation; and 
the contemporary inscriptions of colonial culture in Philippine society. It is 
hoped that the thematic clusters proposed here can help round out the aes-
thetic of a contested coloniality in contemporary Philippine art. I define the 
colonial as an instantiation of the domination of a power over an entitlement 
and the resistance against it. An "imperialist" project, which characterizes 
American rule in the Philippines, may fall under "colonial," but this idea needs 
elaboration that this paper can not perform. The inherent contradiction of 
coloniality as, to amend the reference of Walter Benjamin, a document of 
culture and a document of barbarism, inscribes within culture its intrinsic 
limit and ineluctable postness. 
Memory as Archive 
The concept of memory as an active, or even activist, nostalgia for the 
past is rooted in history and historiographic retrospection. Official history, in 
documents and other literature, can be challenged within Philippine con-
temporary art that rethinks the terms with which colonialism is made effec-
tive as an aesthetic culture. 
Santiago Bose puts up collages juxtaposing historical pictures, blown up 
through photocopying technology, betraying the seams of Third World "imi-
tation" and "repetition" with drawings of talismanic icons. In "Colonizing 
Taste" (1998), the pictorial coherence of a tab-
leau of Filipino Mickey Mouse bubble gum agents 
proudly posing in their American suits in f ront of 
the neoclassical Executive House, is disrupted by 
written incantations of millenarian prayers and 
with the almost wraith-like intimation of a potent 
figure appearing as omen. Here, and in his other 
works, the colonial intersects with the imperialist 
moment and with the global capitalist extensions. 
(Hobson; Lenin; Shumpeter) Bose's oeuvre har-
nesses the Fil ipinos bricoleur mindse t which 
refunctions tools and doctrines of domination into 
carnivals of hybrid meanings. The artist practically 
ransacks the propaganda of history, catechism, 
and even of art, to render it vulnerable to the 
Santiago Bose, Contemplat-
ing Infinito Dios and Vermeer 
(1997) 
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POSTCOLONIAL SUFFERANCE 
haun tings of animism, globalization, and 
political struggle in the present. Bose's 
art reminds us of the works of Ofelia 
Gelvezon-Tequi, who likewise violates the 
pictorial coherence of established images 
to ferret out of the woodwork personages 
and movements lurking in the cracks of 
the so-called parchment curtain. Tequi 
appropriates Renaissance paintings and 
repossesses them in order to yield politi-
cal tableaux of topical resonance, in the 
same way as Roberto Feleo reinvents co-
lonial iconography as a source of popu-
lar culture. 
A specific aesthetic recasts the char-
acters of the tarot card and by retelling 
the narrative of fortune, marks the achievement of Brenda Fajardo as both 
chronicler and seer of history. Perhaps taking to heart the idea that the fu-
ture is not a ship that arrives, but rather is prophesied as a material condition 
to be claimed as a rightful legacy, the artist plays the role of a visionary who 
takes certain risks to shape the present in the image of the "impossible:" that 
which is yet to come because it is "not yet possible," but already heralded. In 
her fourteen panels on Philippine history titled "Baraha ng Buhay Pilipino" 
("Cards of Philippine Life," 1998), she surrounds historical scenes with the 
energies of localized tarot cards presented in a folk form to resignify a criti-
cally inherited past, a possible unfolding, an emergence of a historical wish 
adumbrated in its possibility in art. For instance, the magician in the tarot 
becomes Uncle Sam, who is the agent of U.S. imperialism's sorcery. 
Remastery of the Code 
The master narrative of colonialism is reread and decoded in a new 
semiotic scheme of possible meanings and practices of meaning making. A 
different grammar is spoken through the parodic doublespeak of postcolonial 
language. The latter ambivalently plays out within the context of colonial 
rules, and is relearned in the instance of its pragmatic utterance. 
Imelda Cajipe-Endaya reinvents the tradition of Maria devotion by in-
vesting the woman figure, which is in Philippine art usually portrayed with 
the traditionally dolorous and passive rendering of the Mother and the Vir-
Alfredo Esquillo, jr., Daang Ligid 
Krus (Maze) (1996) 
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PATRICK D . FLORES 
gin, with contemporary significance and ideological rounder. In "Not Paper 
Maché," the paper mache dolls ( taka), made by Filipino women in the South-
ern Tagalog town of Paete, suggest the traffic of female labor across the globe; 
and in "Inay, Ineng, Kalayaan ay Inyo Rin" ("Mother, Daughter, Freedom is 
For You"), sawali (woven splits of bamboo used as walls for huts and shacks) 
frames women who must struggle against the indignity of being homeless and 
the threats to their maternal role as keepers of hearth. Cajipe-Endaya's repre-
sentation of the maternal persona revises the discrepant roles of the Filipino 
woman. From the Maria imaginary, she becomes a symbol of the nation cast 
in paper maché techniques. As craft, "she" is exported abroad, her labor, as is 
the labor of the women who fashion her, is commodified. As a migrant com-
modity, she is a mother who leaves her children at home, to elsewhere take 
care of other children, a n d / o r a young woman who becomes a mail-order 
bride. She grieves the loss of the family and the absence from her kin, but is 
declared a "heroine" by the nation-state for the dollar remittances she duti-
fully sends, keeping in such a way the economy afloat. 
In one of his projects, Markjustiniani creatively reuses parts of thejeepney, 
the country's mass transport which was resoldered from World War II ve-
hicles left by U.S. soldiers, to comment on the follies of the Filipino character 
and on the situations that give rise to these. The artist's mixed-media work 
ingeniously integrates the critique of colonial values with the patriarchal and 
paternalist codes of popular culture. 
Manuel Ocampo, who is currently based in Berkeley in Southern Califor-
nia, has blasphemed institutional religion in very fierce ways. Ocampo tampers 
with, revamps, mocks, cuts up, and tears asunder the pressure points at which 
coloniality begins, ends, and is extended. The fragmentation of bodies, for 
instance, leaves a trail of relationships among floating forms, details, motifs, 
and iconographies. Striking in this imagined scape of meaning is the media 
through which culture is made popular in multiple ways, from state-spon-
sored propaganda through religious mass production and to global capitalist 
fetishization. The artist builds his critique and reconstruction of colonial cul-
ture around the themes of excess and defacement as part of the broader project 
of repositioning the politics of the baroque, migration, and the very idiom of 
painting. In a heady and hectic mélange of allusions to disease, cannibalism, 
decapitation, fascism and faith, dismemberment, profanity, mutilation, and 
excrement, Ocampo's hysterical painting violates the modernist sterility of 
the canvas, examining in such a way the entrails of purity and property within 
an aesthetic of filth and abjection. As one critic puts it: "From the postcolonial 
pathology (the abject status of the colonized body).. .we arrive at this e/ 
sc(h)atological painting which includes the sediment both of the megaloma-
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nia. . .and of the impotence of a painting that makes a homeland... Something 
stinks of rot yet, paradoxical ly, it stands before our eyes and is only 
paint." {Castro Flores 1996, 29) 
Another Filipino expatriate artist in the United States is Paul Pfeiffer, 
who ponders the design of sexuality in the architecture of the religious edi-
fice. In his investigation of the archaeology of the body as a temple of the 
familiar through which a polytropic Man is transformed, he deconstructs the 
treasured humanist credo that Man is the measure of all things. In his art the 
body becomes a colony that mediates its subjection to a vernacular practice, 
that is, a subversion of the colonial rule. Pfeiffer argues: "To attempt a 
racialized, sexualized vernacular out of a heroic, patriarchal geometry is an 
illegitimate production that speaks of resistance." In one work, Pfeiffer col-
lects images of pornography and ethnographic photographs from the com-
puter and re-encodes them as floorplans of canonical church architecture 
like St. Peter's Basilica and S. Giorgio Maggiore. 
Defensible Survival 
The everyday history of contemporary Filipinos is a narrative of personal 
and political survival. But this survival is not just a subsistence, it is a struggle 
that is waged against versatile modes of coloniality in the local moral worlds, 
where getting by does not only mean eking out a living, but pursuing a defen-
sible personhood, taking the risk it bruisingly entails. 
Alfredo Esquillo, Jr . gives the colonial argument a new turn by discussing 
contemporary Philippine society in terms of a labyrinth in which an icon stand-
ing at every turn and religious tableaux, mocked by violence and neurotic 
adulation, lines the route. This can only give us a sense of surplus, of bulimic 
idolatry in a season of deprivation and hopelessness. The artist's "Daang Ligid 
Krus" (Maze) is an allegory of Philippine Catholic life that transforms a par-
ticular event, the Feast of Souls and Saints, into a sustained discourse on the 
Filipino Way of the Cross. The stations in this social itinerary are marked by 
religious statuaries, a crucifix, and the Black Nazarene borne on a stand stud-
ded with talismans. Winding their way through a stone maze, women in veils, 
a brass band, lovers, and bystanders are trapped in an iterative scheme. In 
this social still life, seen from the wall of the cemetery, a vantage point that 
affords the witness a multi-planar lay of the land, the grids, delineated by 
panels, stand out, stressing the presence of alarming images. The fascination 
with faith in the gods of prosperity inspires irreverence; the cross is carried as 
both burden and luxury. This can be viewed in the cabinets, boxes, and cases 
105 
PATRICK D . FLORES 
of Norberto Roldan which harbor goods and market-day merchandise of folk 
Catholic devotion, from luminous crucifixes and rosaries through amulets 
and candle effigies to devices of local healing. This colonial repertory of pro-
pitiations usually intersects with images of the mass media and social turbu-
lence that are foregrounded in the works of Nunelucio Alvarado, Elmer 
Borlongan, Emmanuel Garibay, and Alwin Reamillo. Their art summons the 
spirits of the colonial pantheon but reconfigures their presence within dis-
courses of peasant revolution, class attrition, urban hemorrhage, radical the-
ology, and struggle against capital in whatever guise it dwells. 
Sanggawa was an art collective that used to do murals for towns and 
churches, as well as for galleries and museums. The work entitled "Second 
Coming" is part of a series of editorial artworks documenting in a satirical 
mode the key events and dramatic personae which defined the news in Ma-
nila in 1994 and in early 1995, including the visit of the Pope, that proclaimed 
the Philippines as the only "Christian nation in Asia." Sanggawa portrayed 
these events under a carnival tent and with the trappings of the circus. The 
group identified religion and entertainment as the win pivots to which the 
events of that times had turned. 
Devotion as a colonial gesture initiates suppression and supplication. 
Asked about his vision as artist, Jose Legaspi unburdens himself and calls his 
art confessional, a personal disclosure of unconscious misgivings and leave 
takings within a proscriptive Catholic culture. The artist regards his images as 
autobiographical half-truths flowing through a stream and arising from se-
cret bedmates. A recurring trope is the constricted space: a bed in a room, an 
alley, a void dappled with stars. The work "The Flood," consisting of 1,200 
pastel drawings on bond paper, is similar to the point of tearing down the 
surface of "walls" and "overwriting" them with a proper visual diary of a his-
tory-in-progress. He confesses that as a young boy, he defiled the family altar, 
crowning the Madonna with the devil's horns to express his anger toward his 
mother; the Mother and the Madonna would later become one. The artist 
relates that he begins the toil of evoking the past with the images of the "kill-
ing of the child" and of the "birth at the urinal," which he imagines as the site 
of his own expiration before death. With these scenes of terror, he rummages 
through a trope of traumas to "make sense," leading him to intuit his pre-
symbolic world of what could have been, a reckoning of a prospective and 
retrospective past that is born in regret (what should not have been) and not 
in hope (what could have been possible). From here, Legaspi sets sail into an 
inclement journey from birth to childhood to old age and finally to a préfigu-
ration of a suicide as he testifies to his seething sexuality. 
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POSTCOLONIAL SUFFERANCE 
Critical Inheritance 
With these artistic agencies and works in mind, we can say that the con-
temporary colonial figuration through its main tendencies in Philippine art -
memory as archive, remastery of the code, and defensible survival - perme-
ates much of the aesthetic and moral culture today in the Philippines. These 
representations of the colonial are not mere vessels that contain content, but 
are modes of materializing form and feeling in order to constitute an aes-
thetic practice that creates political possibility. Pierre Macherey, through 
Derrida, leads us to the phrase "critical inheritance" which he explains thus: 
"In fact, one does not inherit only from the past of the past, and it must even 
be said that, f rom that which is dead once and for all and cannot return, 
there can be no inheritance. Rather, one inherits from that which, in the 
past, remains yet to come, by taking part in a present which is not only present 
in the fleeting sense of actuality but which undertakes to reestablish a dy-
namic connection between past and future." (Macherey 1999, p. 19) 
I re-motivate "critical inheritance" in this paper to stress the chances of 
reconverting the colonial aesthetic into a redemptive transfiguration of a 
postcolonial future for the Philippines. 
Such "critical inheritance" finally renovates suffering into sufferance. 
Lexically, sufferance may mean the "act or a state of suffering," or the "pa-
tience or endurance under suffering." We stand by the term as a means to 
explore the possibility of reclaiming the affect of sufferance as an emotional 
economy of struggle that engages the suffering agent, or, more appropri-
ately, the sufferant, to exceed "the power by which it is enabled." (Butler 
1997, p. 15) The generative impulse of subjectivity emerges from subjection, 
rendering agents not solely compliant to or complicit with power, but rather 
co-operators in the process of its generation. The politics of resistance can be 
made only if it is carrying multiple loads of commitments within discrepant 
social fields of practice, and when resistance as a condition of sufferance is 
made accountable to a moral economy or to a local moral world in which life 
is justified by criterions of a defensible humanity and native dignity. (Kerkvliet 
1991) 
There is political interest in deploying the term sufferance in relation to 
suffering, which has attracted considerable interest in established medical, 
psychological and anthropological writings, but which may also be construed 
as reactionary and passive and, in fact, prone to the manipulation of fascist 
persuasions. In this respect, suffering as a pervasive aesthetic in popular cul-
ture and in Philippine social representations may also be linked to the dis-
course of melodrama and its attendant excess and oftentimes hysterical ex-
107 
PATRICK D . FLORES 
pressiveness that is rerun in movies, literature, radio, television, and related 
media. To deal with the banality of sufferance as a contemporary colonial 
and mediatizing trope, therefore, is to engage in the politics of redeeming it. 
In this project, sufferance, owing perhaps to the wordplay insinuated by the 
suffix anceand to its possible Derridean circulation, recuperates this perceived 
state of inertia and reenergizes its transformative potential. This is a neces-
sary ideological act that need not be seen as a teleological turn, but rather as 
an aspiration to situate theory in social practice and within the processual 
constitution of human agency. Sufferance as some kind of a political vector is 
fraught with tension and moves along a contested passage in a nuanced spec-
trum of possibilities, from grief to melancholia to indignation to struggle, 
and, back and forth, in the continual testing of limits and extensity at the 
edge of a fully catholic salvation. 
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