by Dulce Cuna Anacion
Paper delivered in the University of Ghent, Belgium at the
29th International PSYART Conference, July 4-8, 2012
In 2007, they removed my womb. It was a relief after months
of excruciating pain and the feeling of heaviness around my lower abdomen, the
hard and swollen sides often throbbed of pain when touched or pressed. I went
under the knife with a surgical procedure called TAHBSO (Total Abdominal
Hysterectomy Bilateral Salpingo Oophorectomy), the removal of the uterus, both ovaries, fallopian tubes with an
incision on the abdomen. They also removed my appendix and I guess cleaned my stomach
cavity for I knew any of those swelling glands burst. I whispered to my doctor:
“Paano ‘yan Doc, hindi na ako mabubuntis”
(Now what, Doc, I can’t be pregnant anymore!) to which she smiled: “My
dear, you are in Menopause!” After 5 hours in the operating room, they removed
two large cystic ovaries as big as grapefruits, a shrunken uterus and an
appendix. I was relieved from the pain of my abdomen. However the
post-operation pain was just as excruciating. One dark thought hang over me
like a sword of Damocles: “Will I ever be Creative again without a Uterus?”
To a Woman, the
Uterus and its Ovaries is the most important feminine “machinery” in her body.
It takes centre stage in all the whys and wherefores in her life like a second
brain. Its equivalent is similar to the male testicles or “balls”. Hence when
she manipulates in the external world of things and people she is said to “have
balls” or it “takes balls”, thus it takes some sort of an “ovarian energy”-- an
energy field which is related to her domestic work, sense of well-being, love
and sex. Here the woman relies so much of her Identity with this gland. With
this belief, I felt disconcerted and uneasy with this situation. It felt like a
feminine castration.
The painful advent to my hysterectomy was the
synopsis of my maidenhood. It developed a uterus on its way to degeneration of
its cells, on the transition from the benign to the malignant, which may or may
not metastasize into cancer or even death. I connected my Uterus to the years
of suffering I had with dysfunctional relationships, work pains and
frustrations, death of my parents which marked the end of my childhood. It was
the pain of Reality, of waking Life which was greater than the physical pain
imminent in nurturing those cysts that caused all the chronic pains in my
body--bloating, migraines, dizziness, etc. I approached many ways to alleviate
the pain, taking a lot of pain relievers, yoga, herbal medicines and
acupuncture to stop the enlarging of my cysts to full blown. I procrastinated a
lot and defied doctor’s advice of early removal because I believed it would
somehow melt down or “disintegrate”. Thus I resorted to visualization. Being a
painter, I painted my pain, its physical and its abstract, its entirety and specific.
I painted “The
Wounded Pintado Princess” after my hospital pain. Though the tag line is so
literal, the images I imbued in the painting is in a sense of play--playing
with the Art of Pain. I poised myself with the urge to construct, to recreate,
or maybe to award myself with a sense of “royalty” for enduring surgery and
bodily change. I visaged the scars of the operation into items of texture,
line, space, and used colour for volume and intensity. At the back of my head,
I was wrenching myself out of the dark realms of of non-creativity, and perhaps
holding on to the passion of creativity by the thought of non-fecundity.
“Ovum” is a
commemoration of what my body could create, a once fecund Shape which held a
fetus, but now festooned with “flores para los muertos” (flowers for the dead,
the dead ovum not the fetus), mounted on a silvery background which signified
status. The painting itself was my self-trophy, a plaque of merit for it
produced me children which one could be proud. It was homage to an ovoid ovary,
now deified.
The latest performance
art I did was called “Boxed” - it conceptualized the Artist as an altruistic
mercenary. In the four phases of the box she tempers the Pain of Mediocrity
with the use of multi-media, the varied construct and deconstruct of artistic
expression when obliged to conform to societal issues. In the last face of the
four sided box she resurfaces from the colour box; from being boxed, from
dictates, from expectations-- after cutting a thin membrane of superficial colours,
she emerges from the shackles of “put on” art, to be wild and free once again
which actually is her gain. But then again, the performance was intended to
vilify the dictated and shackled artist, who expresses on an extremely measured
space…literal though, so my “boxed” audience will understand.
This note is an
example how Pain is “beatified” in an individual artist, in the creation of
two-dimensional artworks, in three-dimension visionary performance and the
belief that there is something greater than the Pain experienced, or being
experienced by recreating the Pain itself.
PAIN in CONTEMPORARY
FILIPINO ART: ANG
KIUKOK and NUNELUCIO ALVARADO
Leading contemporary
artists on Pain today in Philippine Contemporary Art are Ang Kiukok and
Nunelucio Alvarado. Although Ang Kiukok died in 2005, he influenced his
contemporaries on images that portray the angst of pain felt after he arrived
from New York in 1965 where he was culture-shocked
at the sight of stark alienation and dehumanisation in the American lifestyle.
Since then, in different mediums such as oil, watercolour, pen and ink, he
began filling his canvases with distinct abstract expressionist style of vivid,
cubist figures and images of outrage and agony filled with anger, sorrow,
ugliness and madness, which are grotesque and often morbid representation of
life scenes, a factor unappreciated by many which slighted the commercial
viability of his works until the 1980s when he firmly established himself
as a top-seller. Since then, he enjoyed eminent success in the country and
around Asia, with exhibits in Manila, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, as well as in
the Netherlands, Canada and the United States. He had become the best-selling
Filipino artist in auctions locally and internationally at Sotheby’s and
Christie's.
His lineage was
Chinese, and Chinese in the Philippines (Tsinoys) were mostly idealists, and
Ang Kiukok’s personal philosophy was no exception. What could not be doubted
was the violence in his imagery, a factor that slighted the commercial
viability of his works until the 1980s. He favored such subjects as fighting
cocks, rabid dogs, and people enraptured by rage or bound in chains. He painted
multiple depictions of the crucified Christ that did not shirk from portraying
the agonies normally associated with the crucifixion. When asked why he was so
angry, he replied, "Why not? Open your eyes. Look around you. So much
pain, anger, sorrow, ugliness. And also madness." The intensity of his
works stood in contrast to his own personality, described as "placid and
affable"
Continuing
Ang Kiukoks’ vision of angst and pain are the works of Nunelucio Alvarado, a
Negrense living amidst the workers of the sugar cane fields of Sagay, Negros
Occidental. He depicted the plight of the underpaid sugar cane hacienda workers
called Sagadas. His paintings created a visual twinge of its own, images of
bamboo stakes, scythes, knives, created the stark symbolism of social realism.
An Alvarado work shows the painful disparity of social class: the hacienderos
and the sagadas, managed thru a depiction of stunted figures, bulbous eyes and
veined hands and feet, sheer colors and iconography to represent allegory,
dreams and spirituality and even candid comedy. Alvarado’s paintings speak of
Pain as part of the Joy of Life, where harsh reality is a longing of a sweet
toothed Sagada boy for a Tootsie Roll, while parents work on the sugar cane
fields for a measly sum of pesos…Alvarado has induced satire and irony of the
poor and impoverished, the silent victims who endure inequality and oppression,
and one way to find out their Pain was to live amongst them. I myself was
invited to stay in his “residencia” (a hut out of bamboo and nipa, devoid of
indoor plumbing, but with a roofdeck and lanai where I could sleep). In Sagay
beach, a drive away from Bacolod city, Nune, whom I fondly call him, paints
Pain, not to alleviate suffering, but as a struggle to effect social change.
PAIN in PHILIPPINE HISTORY
and RITUAL
The Pintado image in
“The Wounded Pintada Princess” was also my homage to courage of endurance.
Pintados were tattooed peoples in our archipelago long before we were
rediscovered by the Spanish and were colonized. These people however were
eradicated by religion and conversion to the Catholic faith by the friars in
the 1600s after Ferdinand Magellan
landed on the shores of our country. Francisco Alzina, a Jesuit friar and
chronicler noted on the tattooing practices of the Pintados as a very painful
and enduring process, (please note that he referred tattooing as “painting”):
"The Bisayans are called Pintados because they
are in fact so, not by nature although they are well-built, well-featured and
white, but by painting their entire bodies from head to foot as soon as they
are young men with strength and courage enough to endure the torture of
painting. In the old days, they painted themselves when they had performed
some brave deed. They paint themselves by first drawing blood with pricks from
a very sharp point, following the design and lines previously marked by the
craftsmen in the art, and then over the fresh blood applying a black powder
that can never again be erased. They do not paint the whole body at one time,
but part by part, so that the painting takes many days to complete. In the former
times they had to perform a new feat of bravery for each of the parts that were
to be painted. The paintings are very elegant, and well proportioned to the
members and parts where they are located. I used to say there, captivated and
astonished by the appearance of one of these, that if they brought it to Europe a great deal of money
could be made by displaying it. Children are not painted. The women paint the
whole of one hand and a part of the other."[1]
For want of a term in those times, since “tattoo” (tatu) is a
Asian-Pacific term, the Spaniards described the Bisayans as “painted people”,
hence the term “Pintados”. Yet they had misgivings of the practice and blatantly
blamed the female Bisayan for instigating the practice and considered it a
“work of the devil.”
“I am inclined to think that these people imitated the
custom from newcomers to the Islands; or that one of their braggarts started
the practice himself to give an appearance of greater ferocity; or that one of
their ancient priestesses instigated it. These devil-women, to whom the devil
appeared in a tattooed body might have started the custom in imitation of him. (I am told these women
practice their calling even before Faith reached these Islands). Whether this
custom was started by the people themselves or whether their common enemy
taught it to them for his own ends (none of which was good), it is a fact that all Bisayan men tattooed themselves with the exception of those they call Asog.[2]
This however
exemplifies the apparent bias of the Spanish on our local practices regarding
Pain. To the early Pintados , the pain concept was regarded as a rite of
passage in every Bisayan man. It was said that their nobility had tattoos all
over and the more tattoos on a person, the higher the status you had. It was
reported that Rajah Siani and Kolumbu, the nobility who met up with Magellan’s
party upon landing on the islands had tattoos all over, hence they were those who
have undergone the pain of body carving, which their tribal members follow suit.
The chronicle of Alzina noted this as a form of bodily decoration…but it was
more than that! Alzina even suggested
bringing natives abroad and displaying them in fairs or selling them as slaves.
The more decorated they are, the higher the price they would be in the market.
The Spanish reduced the sanctity of the rite of passage through pain into crass
commercialism.
WOMEN and PAIN
Scattered
throughout the visages of Philippine History, Women are objects of Pain.
History becomes “Herstory” when juxtaposed against sagas and epics of women as
high priestesses and healers (“babaylans”) who instigate practices, recreating
and paying homage to childhood and rites of passage, birth pains, and even the
pain of loss: Motherhood or Widowhood. Pain experienced in the intransigence of
time found in literary characters of the national hero, Dr. Jose Rizal, like
the demented “Sisa”- the battered woman who succumbed to dementia after losing
her sons to the atrocities of the friars in “Noli Me Tangere” (Touch me Not).
To Dr Jose Rizal, Sisa was the
woman-oppressed, the woman stripped of her dignity of motherhood, the woman
consumed by social cancer. Rizal’s archetypes of Pain were carried by the women
in his novels, Noli me Tangere, and the El Filibusterismo (first published in
Ghent in 1891). It articulated that women felt intensely pain in domestic home,
in body and in memory.
BLOOD and
PAIN
Earlier
treatises on the tattooing practices in the Philippines assumed that the
universal concept of “drawing of blood” is the noblest act to established
bravery, valor, courage and pact. The endurance of pain while cutting the
wrists to draw blood is associated with the rite called “Sandugo” (El Pacto de
Sangre) and established a validation of friendship or a sacred seal of kinship.
The “One Blood” rite is immortalized in the painting of Juan Luna (Blood
Compact) portraying the ritual between Rajah Sikatuna (also
known as Datu Sikatuna) and Miguel López de
Legazpi who is accompanied by other conquistadors. Rajah
Sikatuna was described to be “being crowded out of the picture by Miguel López
de Legazpi and his fellow conquistadores”. The drawing of blood was described to be the coming of Age of the
Filipino and the birth of the Philippines as a nation in the 19th
century.
“Sandugo”
is now a festival celebrated in the island of Bohol, Philippines in the Month
of March to commemorate this treaty and pact. Pain ensues into celebration.
Filipinos commemorate Pain (of War, of loss, or of being conquered) in the
joyful festivals that mark the holidays in the Philippine calendar.
PAIN and
BELIEF: “Yunal” – the Orasyon Tattoo
A very
interesting presentation of Pain in Filipino folk life is found in their
“Anting-Antings”, (amulets). This particular amulet which carries the pain of
its installation is called “Yunal” – it is a mark or tattoo on the skin of the
folk Catholic religious of the Islands who do not only believe in the strict
dogmas of Catholicism but inculcate into them their animistic past and the
supernatural which were not totally eradicated by religious conversion in the
Philippines. Not only did the Filipinos embrace the religion of the Spanish but
they also “Filipinized” its elements. These amulets come in the form of prayer
tattoos embedded on the skin. It is said that the wearer of a special
“orasyones” (prayers) becomes one with the virtue elicited by the prayer.
Sometimes these prayers carry with them symbolic motifs and are forms of
religiousity, the cross, the all-seeing Eye of Omnipotence, and even the Mother
of Perpetual Help icon. The motifs and symbols may be artistic or recreated
from local understanding of religious icons and imagery. And again, the more
orasyones in one’s body, the more invulnerable one is. For these prayers and
symbols are marks of protection. There are many kinds: Prayers for
vulnerability and invincibility, prayers for business and prosperity, prayers
to ward off the supernatural and prayers for healing and well-being. “Yunal”
has been my study in my postgraduate years but still gather nuances on it for
the practice is slowly encroaching or replaced by decorative notions, thus
losing the potency of it or what it is meant by it. The prayer shaman (parapamatbat) instructs the wearer that
he must perform a feat of pain in order to claim possession of the virtue or
prowess to where it is attached, or take possession of its merits. Usually the
feat is either participating in Holy Week ceremonies depicting the Passion and
Crucifixion of Christ or Self-Mortification. Fr. Leonardo Mercado SVD, an
authority on Filipino Religious Psychology notes why the Filipino does not make
a big deal on enduring Pain because it is imbued in his sense of belief:
In all major aspects in folk life, the supernatural
takes a part, the belief that otherworldly elements participate in our way of
life is strongly observed. He explains that the belief of the supernatural
world also has a role in Christian belief. For that effect he calls that
Filipino worldview as “Monistic”. He talks about it as a non-dualistic
way of looking at the world, where the Filipino way of life does not dichotomize between mind and matter,
body and soul, between one and many, thought and reality or the objective and
the subjective, the sacred and the profane. [3]
IN CONCLUSION
So what is Pain,
really? I have started writing this paper and painting pain not because of the
PAIN I have undergone carrying my cysts and thru surgery, but because of the
FEAR of losing my Creativity. But I was wrong. Pain induced Creativity. The
myth of the Womb and Ovaries as our “Balls” I debunked. Feminine Intelligence
does not lie in our Balls but on that abstract concept which triggered
fecundity. Our History, Herstory, Rituals and Belief have records of pain as a
faculty or catalyst to stir and create osmosis of social change, physical
metamorphosis (abstract pain to tangible artwork), or spiritual
“awakening”.
As a race who has
undergone “chronic pain” through history, we enjoin Art and Pain as a sense of
Identity in the strength of our human spirit.
Journals:
- Alzina, Francisco SJ, “Historias de las Islas de Indios de Bisaias, 1668”, (translated) Leyte-Samar Studies Journal, Divine Word University of Tacloban
- Ibid.
- Mercado, Leonardo N., SVD, Filipino Religious Psychology, DWU Publications
