Privilege, protests, and the case for “kapwa”

Let me get this out of the way first: Jia Tolentino is undeniably a prophet of our age (well, to me). I had been following her since her Jezebel days and still read her New Yorker essays.

Last week I read an interview she gave on the difficult discipline of hope, and it moved me in ways that cutesy Thought Catalogue-y inspirational essays with watercolor pull quotes could never. (This pandemic, it seems, has tuned my toxic positivity tolerance level to zero.) I am, like her, pregnant, angry, and convinced that –

…capitalist individualism has turned into a death cult; that the internet is a weak substitute for physical presence; that this country criminally undervalues its most important people and its most important forms of labor; that we’re incentivized through online mechanisms to value the representation of something (like justice) over the thing itself…

Unlike her, though, I have not been able to add my warm body to these protests: when agents of the government violated quarantine rules with impunity as COVID-19 cases continued to rise with no prospects of widespread testing, tracing, and treatment; when the Anti-Terror Bill was signed into law; when ABS-CBN was shut down. I am worn down every day by the impotence of my anger.

Yet she’s right – I do have capital. I have the privilege of being able to write, to not starve while unemployed (at least for some time), to interrogate this discomfort and suffering.

There is a Filipino concept we have of loob and labas – the relational self and the other – and while we consider the other taga-labas, there will always be that distance, that abstractness of social justice. I experience discomfort, but only by proxy. Your suffering is not my suffering. Hindi kapwa-tao.

The Sufis have something similar, the concept of our infinite soul being bound up with everyone else’s. Rumi wrote,”Every heart breaks. But not every heart breaks open.” I am deathly afraid of breaking open – was not Christ tortured and broken to feed the multitudes? And yet perhaps this is why this isolation does not feel like an enriching retreat (Sufis’ khalwa) but a prison – because we are clipped, robbed of the usual ways to go out into society and give of ourselves (jalwa). We hold our breaths in and think we will live. Yet pakikipagkapwa requires us to exhale, to breathe life into others.

Jia says one skill we ought to learn during this quarantine is “to make someone feel loved from a distance.” I admit this still confounds me. We are all still fumbling at making our presence felt on Zoom. We are a tangle of phantom limbs flailing, trying to join the movement, to make a useful noise, to be kapwa to one another.

Yes, hope is a discipline. It has to be, for us to master this new dance.

I marvel at how this piece of art was created apart, together in 27 different bathtubs. If it can be done for Swan Lake, one hopes it can be done for activism.

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash