Pinoy, guising!

Next week, I shall be celebrating my one-year anniversary-back-in-the-Philippines. How have I fared so far?

Family and friends – excellent; art – very good; work – good; love – fair; sex – not applicable.

Life is not supposed to be fair, that’s what art is here for: to tip the scales, mess up the formula and create off-balanced narratives.

Surprise?

"Surprised!," ex-claimed Mr. Dreary Existence.

Who claims NATIONALITY?

Who claims REALITY?

Who claims REASON?

Who claims IMAGINATION?

The baggage claim area in Heathrow airport was Elysium – a paradise lost for luggage holding up to be found. Foreign bodies (Londoners included, there is no native anymore) awaited their suitcases with cool and quick abandon. Oscar Wilde may have pointed out that America is so obsessed with travel and movement, and Edith Wharton who had observed that Americans are more concerned with getting away from something rather than getting to them, still I can’t discount the prowess of other nationals when it came to grabbing their bags of material wealth and leaving materiality in a pulse.

Leaving Manila for Halloween in London was a fun dilemma. While Halloween tradition here is for rich brats marching from house to house asking for treats such as candy and other junk food, I on the other hand, settled for poor tricks. What’s the point of dressing up in some faux scary costume and then asking people in an annoyingly saccharine tone, "Trick or treat?" This bland ritual just goes to show how the suburban version of horror is all makeup, sugar and falsetto voice. Why does fantasy and play have to be on the surface, or worse, a send-up? The real Halloween costume would be your everyday attire, i.e. hyper preppy/peppy. The trick in this fashionable and uber-real look is to seriously appear wholesome and adorable. Go to as many households as you can, and to far-flung posh villages if possible. Don’t knock down the door, ring the door bell (you are in an exclusive village). And when you do get to the much anticipated Q&A portion, try answering back with a trick. Always. Treats are for suckers who are slow of mind and fast in digestion. The trickster-traveler has a luggage full of ideas and love to last her a hundred round trips and a million life lessons.

* * *

I did my own trick-or-treating recently at the Science Museum in South Kensington, London. Trick-or-treating, also known as Guising, actually originated in the British Isles, and is still popular in many parts of Scotland, England, and Ireland. It’s called "Guising" because of the disguise or costume worn by the children, and often they get treats only if they perform tricks for the people they visit. Tricks can be in the form of a joke, song or dance. The more clever may do magic, acrobatics or surgery but most kids will still claim lots of treats even with something very simple. Unfortunately, guising seems to be losing its appeal with the youth now, being conquered in certain parts of England by its American counterpart.

We Pinoys are the new Guisers. No, actually we have been sporting colonial looks and performing native tricks for centuries. But instead of sweets, we seem to have developed a craving for flags and space shuttles. In his film Perfumed Nightmare, which is still on exhibit at the Venice Biennale in Italy, the auteur Kidlat Tahimik stars as a Pinoy Everyman longing to travel to America. He wants to see a world up and out there – via the jeepney, the rocket and the man on the moon (for a glimpse of the world upside down and beautiful, see Wong Kar-Wai’s Happy Together). In a scene reminiscent of Halloween, Kidlat attends a masquerade party where he is eventually blown away by the gargantuan and costume-clad foreign dignitaries.

Inside the Science Museum in London I blew away the living, my fellow tourists. And then I treated the space artifacts to a special trick – a trick that is as ambiguous as it is fleeting. Halloween, like Hollywood, is after all a place and an event for the dead. And nothing is more inert than a museum reliquary for sacred relics and scientific gadgets.

Being a Filipino in such occasions is an advantage. Every day is Halloween in the Philippines. We dress up in costumes. We perform tricks. We want treats.

Wanting goodies does not mean we are poor though. The country may be broke, but poverty, well that’s just a state of mind.