In the eye of the beholder
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 18: In the Neighbourhood
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Xavier Hennekinne
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Xavier Hennekinne's biography and other articles by this writer
I would not call Pasay a slum. Calling or not calling Pasay City a slum would assume the ability to make a clear distinction between an overcrowded neighbourhood and a crowded one, between unacceptable housing and acceptable housing. I cannot make that distinction but I would not call Pasay a slum: it is not on top of Garbage Mountain. I would describe Pasay as a poor and bustling municipality of Manila, one with problems.
Of course, distinctions are made. The World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and development agencies use indicators, some Western journalists and tourists use their observations to call Manila a ‘gigantic slum of a city'. It is a shame, somehow, that a value system – whether it is mathematical, cultural or personal – can be used to approach a place like metropolitan Manila.
The French social theorist Jean Baudrillard who died this year, once wrote: ‘What a pity that, in order to say things, you have to go via meaning! What a pity that, in order to know, you have to go via "objective" knowledge! What a pity that, for something to be an event, it has to go through "information"! What a pity that, for there to be exchange, you have to go through value!'
Indeed it is a shame.
Since I arrived in Manila, and started working in Pasay, I have tried to free myself from the ‘objective knowledge' and values I have acquired. With them, I am living in a ‘gigantic slum of a city' and working to improve the poverty indicators in the municipality of Pasay and other parts of the Philippines. Without them, a ‘poetic transfer of situation' occurs and I am simply here, in what seems to me, a busy and poor neighbourhood. Without them, I don't spend my energy pointlessly trying to make sense of poverty. Poverty just is.
The truth is that I like going to Pasay. I have to be on the qui vive all the time when in the streets. There is no footpath. I have to look out for the jeepneys – the small buses made out of jeeps left behind by the Americans after World War II and used as public transport. There are thousands of them, and they smell and release black exhaust smoke; their drivers don't seem to care for pedestrians or for their passengers. At first Pasay was an assault on my senses, and when I went home in the evening I said to myself, ‘That was close but you made it.' Even though nothing had happened.
This has now passed. I have adjusted. From the beginning, there was a sense of balance in this neighbourhood, an order of things. Everything was as it should be – almost. People got on with their business. One gets used to everything. It is easier to get used to being faced with poverty than the absence of it. Our culture of zero poverty is a nil sum system. If you exclude poverty and death, when confronted with them you experience a shock, an excess of reality. An excess of a specific reality.
POVERTY IN MANILLA IS FICTION TO THOSE who haven't visited a large, overcrowded and dysfunctional city – it is unreal. Poverty as I knew it when I was growing up, the poverty I found in books, newspapers and especially on television, was an event. But that is not the reality of poverty. Poverty was an image, now it is reality.
At night, I see rats come out into the streets. Big rats. Rats bigger than cats. Cats have no tails. I wonder if rats bite off the tails of cats. I wonder if I live in a place where rats eat cats. Cats are very skinny, dogs too. Female dogs have long, dangling teats. They look permanently exhausted – the heat, perhaps. Kittens are very, very small. Miniatures. The other day a kitten no bigger than a Filipino eggplant was crossing Libertad Avenue. The traffic had stopped. I saw the kitten stand in front of a jeepney. The tyre was wider than the kitten. The kitten had stopped, perhaps because it was in the shade. Had the jeepney started, the kitten would of course have been flattened. What are the chances of a kitten crossing Libertad Avenue safely when it is so small and skinny and the jeepneys are so big and heavy? What are the chances of a kitten making it to the next day when at night giant rats take over the streets?
The biggest rat I ever saw was flat, laid out in a dark back street. It had been run over, I suppose. Other rats were going through rubbish a few metres away from the flattened corpse. It was late, past midnight; children were playing in the streets.
Children, young children, are sometimes naked in the street. Others wear shorts and t-shirts. Often they are bare-footed. Or they wear thongs. I don't think people in Manila are short of clothing.
Children are left to do what they want, where they want. Children play on the busy streets or by the highway; with dirty water, with rubbish, at night, with others or alone. Their feet and hands are very dirty yet their hair seems soft and silky.
Grilled fish for sale at breakfast. With rice. Fish from the river of plastic bags and plastic bottles. Where mosquitoes swarm. The smell of grilled fish overpowers all other smells at the street corner. In the evening, fish balls being deep fried at the street corner. The smell of wood burning on an improvised barbecue. Resourcefulness.
Everything seems as it should be. Then you start to notice things. You start seeing that some of the children who play with dirty water are sick. One child is ten but the height and weight of a five-yearold; another's skin has erupted. You hear parents telling their children that school is a waste of time, that they should work, find plastic bags in the street and sell them at the market at night.
I said to my mother, ‘I have to help; if someone has just fallen in front of you, you have to help them getting up, you don't walk by.' I would say that poverty was like that, that I could not walk by. Do I think I can really help people get up or do I feel obliged to acknowledge that they are on the ground? I am on occasion convinced one can only look at poverty sympathetically and not do much about it.