SM. IT used to stand for Shoemart. When I was in college, a trip to Quiapo always included going to an SM department store that was one of two early branches in Manila at that time. Carriedo, I think, was the name of the street that building was on. Also, still while I was in college, my parents would visit me in Diliman and we would go to Makati to shop. So I know there was a Makati branch in the 1970s, as well as a Cubao branch, too.
In the 1980s, sometime then, there was one in Harrison Plaza, too. And so it went. SM stores mushroomed, and now there are SM stores everywhere, including our home in the mountains, Baguio.
So one night this week, I’m strolling from Booksale to the grocery, and happen upon this giant woodcarving of a g-stringed giant with a dog on his shoulders, and think not for the first time of the indigenizing of the most commercial of all modern day establishments, a mall. This thought registers and then slips by, until I spy from the corner of my eye a smaller figure beside the giant carving.
I backtrack and now see two giant carvings of men with dogs on their shoulders and a smaller version of them beside one of them, as each giant flanks a stage of sorts. But it is not this smaller version that earlier catches my eye, but that of a woman in native garb, Benguet stereotyped, as far as I can make it.
I’m wondering why the carving of her is so small. It does not even reach the knee of the giant man. I’m thinking is this deliberate, is there some artist’s statement here as communicated about the woman’s size in relation to the man’s size? Or is this one of those Egyptian hieroglyphic statements that is perennially discussed for their meaning/s? Surely, I think, this cannot be, it being 2017, hypermodern are we and all.
The grocery errand beckons, and I walk again in that direction. Then I spy a nephew, and I drag him to the woman’s statue, and we discuss this business of why is she so small? He laughs when he agrees that there’s something amiss here, deliberate or not.
So here’s a shoutout to SM Baguio. The statue of that woman beside those two giant men – it’s in a word my students keep using: mysoginistic, whether meant to be or not. You simply must fix it. Woman are not some dwarf species you can reinterpret (am clearly reading too many thesis proposals) by resizing, and thus diminishing her. We deserve a giant statue too for goodness’ sake.
A giant statue. GIANT.
