Fallen heroes, flawed monuments
Yes, like everyone plugged into the social network and alerted to an anomaly, a good Filipino film, I watched Heneral Luna. The movie did not disappoint. It brought an important phase of our history, albeit one interpretation of it, to life. Since we have a generation or two that have grown up not reading history, cinema, as pedagogic medium, is a good substitute. It is at least one that could spark enough interest in people to re-look and possibly re-read historic literature.
The Story of General Luna is that of a flawed and controversial hero. Our history is full of complicated or flawed characters. Our historical literature and accounts of them are similarly imperfect. Academic research and writing, however, has improved over the last few decades. There is a small but increasing production of books on specific or general history.
Other than books, we remember men (and sadly only some women) of the past, with monuments. Unlike our production of tomes on history, however, the quality of our monuments has deteriorated in the last half century. Looking at what has been built to honor our heroes, the general (that word again!) impression is that we do not respect them very much.
The problem is not so much the sculptures of these men and few women. Our sculptors are quite good at capturing likenesses, with some examples of work that border on the sublime (although I have not seen the monument to the sublime paralytic — the guy who kept in his chair all through the movie Heneral Luna).
The failure of modern monuments is in their settings, or lack of them. Our cities have grown too fast and open space is such a premium that often we find our heroes on traffic islands or at street corners. I spied the statue of President Roxas a few years ago on the side of his eponymous boulevard. He looked like he was hailing a cab. A few hundred meters towards Rizal Park was statesman Carlos P. Romulo at the corner of Roxas Boulevard and United Nations Avenue. No one notices him, not because his statue was short in stature, but because the builders put him right smack at the corner hidden by dense overgrown foliage.
We have many monuments or shrines at street and even highway corners. The People’s Power monument and Our Lady of EDSA are both at corners. The religious shrine was built before the flyovers and the MRT line. She is now obscured by infrastructure in front, along with billboard commercialism photobombing at the back.
We used to know how to honor our heroes, but this was mostly before the Second World War. We did this with elegant statues on plinths of proper proportions, material and detailing. These were set in the middle of plazas or park corners and provided with enough foreground to give viewers proper sightlines. These locations also pre-empted photo-bombers from ruining views.
Today, the few plazas with a monument or two from yesteryear now also host an additional three, four or five more personages. Our plazas are becoming as populated as our cities. There are also instances where there is more than one statue to a hero within the same location. Liwasang Bonifacio has the Supremo standing guard to the neoclassic opulence, while just down the road, his doppelganger raises his bolo to egg on his supporters across Manila’s City Hall.
The next biggest challenge of monuments is maintenance. In fact, the lack of adequate maintenance is the biggest problem with all of our public monuments, plazas and parks (some would venture to declare that all government facilities start deteriorating even before they are completed). Older monuments like the 150-year-old Legaspi and Urdaneta landmark opposite the Manila Hotel are missing bronze parts of their many figures. The OFW sculptural vignette on Roxas Boulevard was a composition of five figures. They are now down to two, with their arms missing. Scavengers hack or saw off these parts to sell to junk dealers.
A good setting of plaza or park is not the only requirement for a monument to serve its purpose of reminding us about the personage honored or event memorialized. These plazas, parks and monuments must be integrated into the urban fabric of the city.
Ideally these monuments are termini of vistas down grand avenues or landmarks that anchor people as they navigate a place. Monuments, like the heroes they valorize must serve as reference points for people to be guided down the straight or honorable path. Without heroes or monuments we will lose our way and our cities will become a blighted mess.
Our monuments today are less than heroic. Our cities are all flawed by agendas of politicians or profit-driven developers. Our battle to save our cities will be lost unless we build robust defenses against unbridled mindless development, devoid of history, culture or rationality.
All is not lost. This writer has been involved in projects to recover the lost elegance of our plazas and the public realm. In the ongoing renovation of Roxas Boulevard we are providing the dozen or so statues there with proper piazzas and plinths. But building our cities and its public spaces and monuments properly in the first place is better than retrofitting a mistake.
We must learn the lessons of history and there are many. We must rally around the memories of those who sacrificed for their principles, those you never yielded to compromise or cowered in the face of tremendous odds. We must all deal with our flaws individually, as a society and as a nation. Ultimately, we must all become heroes and help the country rise above the quagmire of mediocrity, be it in the realm of film or in the reality of our struggle for nationhood.
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Feedback is welcome. Please email the writer at paulo.alcazaren@gmail.com.
