Tuesday, July 08, 2008 Obenieta: Home is not an aquarium By Myke U. Obenieta So to speak
TALK about goose flesh, and its chill doesn’t crawl from under one’s skin only when reading about a shipwreck and bloated bodies floating in its wake. You get it as well in Pinoy gatherings here in the US if you got the penchant for reading lips, particularly those slurping their fake American accent.
All it takes for me to feel no better than a seasick passenger in storm-battered boat is to be in a Pinoy party where the slosh of talk—on top of the swell of videoke voices—ebbs and flows around the topic of homecoming.
“What for, baby?” She may still have retained the sunny disposition of a fish vendor despite her bleached skin, but I might as well have heard someone in advanced state of decomposition in the face of her querulous reply to my query: When do you wish to go back home?
For her, the sink-or-swim drudge in her dreamland is not as surreal as the uncertainty of returning in the old country. If she’d care enough, she could have asked for help from the Coast Guard to retrieve what remains of that nation called nostalgia.
Earlier, I was talking to another kababayan who looked forward to his family’s vacation in their old hometowns in Bohol and Bicol. Come what may, the cliché is still hard candy for him: Home sweet home where the heart is, regardless of the circumstances apt for cardiac arrest.
Never mind what he often hears from the chorus of his expatriate friends who must have sounded to him like Greeks just resurfacing from Atlantis.
To hear them like they’ve drifted back from nowhere, you’d think they were born in a country called Er. Back home, the roads are always getting narrower and dustier under a sun that’s getting hotter. The countrymen are getting hungrier while bigger becomes the bellies of politicians whose faces have turned thicker. And so on and so forth till their mouths froth, often talking about their visits to the homeland like they were sorry for not having the chance to appear live in Wowowee.
No laughing matter, however, when the scattered islands of one’s country is spoken like smithereens of one’s heartbreak. As if turning back would also crack the neck already tied with the weight of a millstone.
Vis-à-vis the tidal wave of Filipinos dreaming to jump ship, the stirrings deep in the heart of Stateside countrymen gazing homeward—despite the strange comforts in their “naturalized” state—would be enough to whirl up a twister of convoluted feelings worthy of the devil and the deep blue sea.
And amidst these crosscurrents of displacement, there’s always the self-proclaimed nationalists thumbing down their noses on the notion of globalization, looking at those washed hither and yon in the tides of diaspora as though their eyeballs were floating in the unruffled waters of an aquarium.
High tide or low tide? Or so retorted a certain Miss Universe contestant from the Philippines when asked how many islands are there in our archipelago. Yes, in this constant state of flux, there’s only the certainty of one’s feet shifting in search of solid ground, whether one talks about hope or being at home.
