madeleine-says

[madeleine-says]

Modern Day Fantasies: Poverty Porn

Growing up in the Philippines, I was accustomed to seeing extreme poverty as a part of daily life. I did not think much of the children my age who would knock on the windows of my family’s car to ask for some spare change. I remained in reverie as squatters and makeshift houses flooded the view. The United States does not experience the same level of poverty. However, what’s so interesting about the relationship the Philippines, and other LEDCs, have with the United States is the numerous American NGOs that have taken root in the local communities. The presence of American aid may seem helpful upon first glance, however a plethora of problems do arise. These issues center around the creation of a curated visual culture that centers on depicting a narrow view of impoverished communities in LEDCs: poverty porn.

Poverty porn involves the depiction of extreme poverty in LEDCs, specifically those in the non-Western world. Characteristics of poverty porn include the presentation of malnourished bodies, specifically those of children, and the living conditions of these communities. Although poverty porn consists of imagery used by NGOs in order to convince civilians to support their cause, the content also promotes a sense of indulgence. There exists the indulgence for Western MEDCs to revel in how groups from outside their world could survive. There is also indulgence in looking at people of significantly less means as a silent validation of one’s privilege. It is also vital that we discuss the 19th century imperial concept of “the white man’s burden”: the view that European imperial powers should colonize non-Western areas to spread European knowledge and education. Poverty porn acts as a justification for colonization as a means to impose European world views, the “correct” world views, on non-European areas.

Poverty porn does not simply indulge Western viewers that hail from MEDCs; they also indulge figures of authority in the aforementioned LEDCs. Poverty porn presents a one-sided view that attempts, albeit unsuccessfully, to capture the entire socio-economic problem of a specific country simply because they are not presented alongside images of wealth from that country to uninformed viewers. NGOs then take in more donations from MEDCs and then distribute those to the local community. However, there is a strong tradition of corruption in LEDCs, such as the Philippines. Although employees must give 30% of their income as tax in order to subsidize government projects, an estimate of 20% live below the poverty line. Moreover, there is always a string of corruption cases in the government. An estimate of 20% of the Philippines’ budget of $10B goes directly to the politician’s pockets. The presentation of impoverished communities in isolation masks the immense corruption that happens behind the scenes. MEDCs and NGOs are compelled to give and give and give without awareness of where their donations end up. The lack of awareness of the inner workings of corruption in an unfamiliar country reinforces the cycle of the poor being poorer and the rich being richer.

On the other hand, the presence of NGOs did help a lot of communities. In the Philippines, Child Hope and World Vision both gave hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of impoverished children an access to education. Donations helped relief efforts for natural disasters such as Typhoon Ondoy and Typhoon Yolanda/Haiyan. That is not to see that NGOs specifically are “bad” or useless. However, we must consider the lens in which these NGOs have in order to operate. The lens shaped by people from MEDCs could not apply to knowing how LEDCs function. The visual culture of poverty porn prevents NGOs and MEDCs from having access to being aware of the full experience of living as an impoverished person in an LEDC. It is also vital for NGOs and MEDCs to be aware of where donations go to in order for their resources to be maximized to help communities.

The term “poverty porn” indicates a sense of indulgence as romanticization, fetishization, and, dare I say, sexualization of the “foreign poor”. Numerous questions arrive from the examination of poverty porn, such as why MEDCs would be interested in “helping” LEDCs and not the impoverished and marginalized in their locale and how could we present poverty in a way that would compel people to donate.

[madeleine-says]

The politics of lactose intolerance

Since coming to the United States, I developed lactose intolerance. I’m not really surprised with this development: my mom developed the same condition later in life and I cannot deny my Asian heritage. Lactose intolerance doesn’t pose any problems back in the Philippines. Only a few dishes employ dairy ingredients. However, American food is a completely different story. Everyday I am confronted with an overwhelming amount of dairy: cream, pizza, cheese, lattés, and more. Being surrounded by but unable to consume dairy is an aspect of reality I have to deal with, save for the days when I actually feel like eating vegan pizza. Being unable to get sustenance that my Asian digestive system could process also has a lot of political and cultural implications. 

In Jordan Peele’s “Get Out”, we see Allison (the creepy girlfriend) consume milk and Froot Loops separately, a metaphor for the segregation of white and non-white peoples. Milk as a symbol for white culture extends beyond this scene. Neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups down gallons of milk during their protests, flaunting the predominantly European “ability” to digest dairy. American food being comprised of a lot of dairy, especially in the Northeast and parts of the Midwest, speaks to how the dietary needs are primarily catered to white Americans. 

The challenges lactose intolerance people face corresponds to the challenges non-white people face in the United States. After all, non-white people are more prone to lactose intolerance. In fact, 75% of the world’s population and 25% of the US population has or will develop the condition. The difficulties in finding food without dairy acts as as a constant reminder that ethnic and racial minorities are not welcomed in the white United States: they could not find sustenance to maintain their stay.  

[madeleine-says]

Ah!

I’m going to write a short story for one of my projects. I love designing books, so I might as well try my hand in writing them. I read a lot, so I hope my good habits will see me through. 

[madeleine-says]

White Walls

As an avid museum goer, I often analyse what makes a curation successful: how was the room fixed in order to supplement the art work, how well-written are the descriptions of the art work, how entertaining could stripped down minimalist abstract paintings be? I ask all of these questions whenever I go to museums and as an art student, I often wonder how to present my own work. 

Enter the debate of white walls and non-white art. I saw this picture, taken by one of classmates in Graphic Design, float around the RISD social media bubble:

The concept of a protest against Western cultural institutions is interesting. Especially a protest done by wearing t-shirts and blocking the view of paintings at MoMA. However, I’m not entirely convinced that this is the way we should go around doing this. No, I am not convinced at all. 

I think that representation is important. I’m lucky enough to be live my formative years in a place where everyone looked a lot like me: dark hair, lightly tanned skin, large eyes, etc. For those who did not get to experience being able to look into another’s face and see your own, especially growing, I could see why representation matters. 

I don’t understand why many feel the need to wiggle non-Western thought into the European narrative. Do non-Europeans not have a history of their own? Let’s make our own institutions, our own museums, so that we have control over what we curate, over what we want to show others. 

Acts of defiance, such as the one in the picture, are not revolutionary at all. Rather, they reinforce the notion that the Western narrative is superior. And that people of non-Western descent are desperate to get in. Flaunting desperation around like a white flag defeats the purpose of resistance. Its a form of submission into a storyline dominated by Euro-centrism and imperialism that starts when we accept that our own histories are not worth celebrating. 

So, let’s remove white walls and build our own. 

[madeleine-says]

‘Cause we’re young and we’re ashamed

Is it okay if I hail Ella Yelich-O’Connor, aka Lorde, as one of Generation Z’s poetic geniuses? Good? Awesome, because that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

Ever since her debut album, Pure Heroine, which I spent sultry summer nights listening to back in high school, Lorde has been at the centre of the whirlwind of success. She’s one of those people within my age bracket that make me ask myself why the hell have I not accomplished anything? In her second album, Melodrama, we see Lorde shed her high school angst in favour for legalised cynicism.

I’m not going to hide my adoration for her song “Perfect Places”. Don't get me wrong, I love all of her songs. “Magnets” helped me through lonely high school lunches in the library. “A World Alone” was my late night soundtrack. And “Royals” made me fall in love with her, just like how it did with everyone else. However, “Perfect Places” really strikes me as just one amazing ball of irony. Lorde croons about the loneliness of the young adult years and how we use partying to fill the void of our existential dread. All in a song that the DJ could totally drop in the wee hours of the morning because everyone is absolutely exhausted from dancing to Soulja Boy in a mosh pit.

Lorde’s uncannily spot on observation of this generation’s tendency to mask our unhappiness, even to ourselves, speaks powerfully to those who sway to the rhythm of sugar-coated sorrow. No matter how hard we may try to delude ourselves into thinking that the faster we go, the greater our chances are of running away from the Thing That Will Catch Us: the meaninglessness of our existence. Maybe drinking with our friends assuages our woes. Maybe “setting ourselves free” with horrible dancing will fill the empty space between beat up bodies.

Lorde laments on the unsuccessful attempts we make at escaping our daily anxieties. They’re always whispering over our shoulders, into our ears. And no matter where we go, how much we change the landscape, we’ll always be haunted by the possibility of never being happy, despite having been convinced of a Happily Ever After (tm), courtesy of Disney Channel.

After all, we’re young and we’re ashamed.

[madeleine-says]

Zadie Smith’s “White Teeth”

I’m around 60% through the book and I’ve already fallen in love with Smith’s erudite yet disarmingly hilarious prose. We need more books that handle the issues of diversity so blithely with amazing taste and tact. 

Whenever I pick up a book about immigrants and children of immigrants, I’m usually confronted with a lot of angst and mundane melodrama. I’m growing weary of how writers and artists handle the topic of migration from a non-Western country to a Western nation (usually the United States of America). 

I love love love how Smith pokes fun at cultural angst, as baseless and absurd. Humour is such a powerful tool, especially to get us through the horrors of quotidian life, especially through a life detached from our so-called heritage. There’s a lot of comfort knowing that the immigrant experience is equally filled with ebullience than it is with hardship. 

[madeleine-says]

On artful tragedy

Attending the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design’s Graphic Design programme has been my dream for ages. Now that I’m in Providence, it seems that I’m at a loss for what to do with the BFA I’ll be receiving in two and a bit years. 

I applied to RISD thinking that art was my Life, my Everything. The reason I take each breath every morning, desperate to pick up the paintbrush, the palette, and the canvas (okay: turn my laptop on and click on the bouncing Photoshop icon) and get to Work. I would draw for hours on end, while watching TV, while listening to music. Hell, I could even tell the time based on the show that aired while I was drawing. If my nerdy friends had math and science to be engineers, I had Art to make me an Artist. 

Now that I’m in RISD, the world’s most prestigious art and design institution (tm), I have fallen out of love with Art. Art capital “A”. 

Being one of the best art students, if not the best, in my high school to just being one of the many talented artists in RISD was a severe blow to my self-esteem. However, this plight is not the reason why I had a falling out with my previous lover. I was lucky enough to be able to bounce back from this minor bump in the yellow brick road. Not a lot of people at RISD have been successful. Some of them even drop out of the school altogether, unable to handle the stress of critique (which sometimes borders unprofessional comments), a crazy workload (I had 30+ hours of homework on top of 30+ hours of class every week during my freshman year), and just the very isolating promise of dedicating your Life to your Work FOREVER. 

I’m clearly still in RISD. In the Graphic Design Programme to be exact. And I really love my department: the teachers, the classes, the work that I’m doing. And yet I still find myself unhappy with my situation. I know that I should not be, but I am. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about why I have found myself in such a predicament. RISD has the tendency to bombard us, the students, with questions of identity politics. I understand that it’s a response to the growing dissatisfaction students have with how faculty and staff treat works that exist beyond the European canon of art, as exemplified through this video regarding “The Room of Silence”. I have experienced this phenomenon, when I made work about Filipino culture. My classmates and teachers were just so scared about commenting on the concept of my work. I understand why they would be: I was the only student of Filipino heritage in my class. It’s so difficult to comment on cultural work outside of one’s own culture. The shortcomings of current American politics, in terms of inclusivity, only makes this situation all the more difficult. 

Due to events in my personal life that have forced me to question my sanity and position in society, I decided to stop making work about Filipino culture, about being Filipino. I don’t think that this is a break or my “evolution” as an Artist. Although my life has not been ideal, I don’t think that aestheticising my “problems” would solve any of them. Moreover, as an ethnic and racial minority in the United States, I play the role as my culture’s unofficial representative, whether I like it or not. When I make art about my culture, I am exploiting the long and drawn out history of Spanish, American, and Japanese colonialism. I am romanticising the ways Filipinos have suffered for a Western audience. I realised that I live in the United States. People from the Philippines will never get to experience my work, yet I am using their experiences. Am I exploiting them for my own artistic and academic benefit? After all, it is me who is making work for my portfolio to get a job from so-and-so company. 

Over the summer, while I was processing the aforementioned events, I read Miguel Syjuco’s “Ilustrado”. The book was a hodgepodge of narratives from different sources and was an enjoyable satire of bourgeois (or should I say “burgis”) Filipino society. More importantly, it brought up the question of who the artist makes art for. In a heated debate on the works of the fictitious author Crespin Salvador, two critics of Salvador question whether or not Salvador made works for or about Filipinos. After all, the majority of the writer’s works were about Filipinos yet written and published in English, the language of the upper classes that reinforces the view of coloniser as strong and native as weak. I looked at my own artistic practice: going to school in the world’s most prestigious art university in the United States, making work about Filipino culture, and then showing it to my American classmates. Why am I making work about the Philippines when I don’t have the opportunity to get critique from Filipinos? Why make work about Filipinos, a group of people immensely affected by American imperialism, and then hope to elicit the sympathy of the very Imperialists in question?! 

I guess my abstinence in regards to making cultural work stands as a pathetic protest to my burgeoning unhappiness with how cultural dialogue is treated here in RISD. I don’t want to make art that amplifies my voice on issues on the suffering of those less privileged than I. I don’t want to make art that reaffirms Filipinos as the victims of colonial history, to make tragedy porn. When I exploit the experiences of marginalised groups, am I better than the white girls I make fun of? Not really. In fact, I might as well start drinking Pumpkin Spice Lattes instead of mango juice. 

[madeleine-says]

On making a home, wherever, whenever

Leaving Manila was one of the easiest things to dream about, but definitely the most difficult to accomplish. I’ve been living in the US for over a year and everyday I still think of the city that I call mine. Providence with its beautiful New England style shingles, snowpocalyptic weather, and convenience still pales against the radiance of Manila’s humidity, pollution, and warmth. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about places and our relationship with places this past year. I’ve been thinking a lot about how a place becomes your own - how you make it your own. I’ve never thought of myself as being part of the diaspora, especially with the Internet and its never ending availability of Filipino memes, but now I could see that slowly happening. 

Being away means being severed from the experiences one thinks they should be a part of. A lot has happened in the Philippines during my absence, from drug wars, to acts of terrorism, to family events, and to local celebrity tsismis (is AlDub still popular?). 

Surely, my witnessing of historical events in the United States, such as a Trump presidency, the numerous Women’s Marches (an avenue for cisgender heterosexual caucasian women to feel like the rest of us minorities, but let’s talk about that later), and the coldest winter nights in US history, would compensate for all the things I’ve missed out back home. The sad thing is - it doesn’t. I don’t think there’s ever a way to quantify two different worlds and call them equal. 

When I arrived last year, I was excited to carve out a home for myself in Providence. I’m now beginning to think that it’s impossible. In fact, I have never felt more alone. How could I create a home for myself where I can’t hear warm laughter, infused with some Tagalog squeals of “Uy!” and “Ikaw ha!”? How was I so stupid to think that I could uproot myself so easily? 

The current US socio-political and cultural climate, one of accepting diversity and difference ironically has made it so difficult for me to adjust to life in Providence. In an atmosphere that champions inclusivity, I have never felt more excluded. Because it focuses on all the ways we are different. Because it asks us to identify what makes us “individuals” instead of what makes us a collective. Because I don’t want to be reminded that someone just yelled “ni hao” and “chingchangchong” at me because of the way I look. Because when you want to make a home, you don’t want to be reminded of all the reasons you don’t belong. 

The most tragic aspect about this ordeal? The longer I’m away from Manila, the more the city becomes a romanticised solace away from Providence. I’ll stop knowing the city for what it is, and start envisioning it as a fairy tale I could rely on in moments of homesickness (like the one I’m having while writing this post). I’ll forget all about Manila, ugly, smelly Manila, replacing its presence in my mind with how I wish it to be, swooping in and saving the day. 

I then look out the window and see Providence from College Hill: I am confronted with my inescapable situation. Can this small city (more of a big town, really) be my new home, albeit a temporary one? 

I don’t know. 

[madeleine-says]

The Contemporary Orientalist Gaze

Jean-Léon Gérôme’s “The Snake Charmer” is the quintessential oeuvre of Orientalism, a term defined by Edward Said as a mechanism for Europe to render Asia and the Middle East as inferior. The Orientalist canon has consequently shaped Western in Europe and the Americas, portraying “Eastern” people as sensual, lethargic, and “exotic”, as “Other”. 

As an international student from Asia studying in the United States, I have the impression that people see my experiences, my “Other” experiences, as some form of sad spectacle. I often get asked about what Asia is like, and by Asia, I mean my holiday trips to Japan, China, and Korea. A constructed view of Asia, by the West, that limits the area, so rich in a plethora of cultures and languages, to the East Asian experience. I am not saying that I “don’t like” East Asian culture. I do enjoy some quality anime, dim sum, and K-dramas. However, I find the West’s selection of which Asian cultures to “appreciate” extremely interesting. 

In theory, how we approach the “Other”, different cultures that are strangers to us, should be equalising. Since one knows nothing about foreign cultures, one should see all foreign cultures as numerous opportunities to gain knowledge about experiences from all over the world. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Some cultures are more prized than others. My friend asked me if I got her souvenirs from Japan rather than souvenirs from the Philippines. Not only was this exchange strange for me, but it was also extremely enlightening: why be more excited about something one has never experienced? Why do we approach some cultures with an open mind and some with trepidation? 

Look to media giants for curating content that elevates some cultures while erasing others. Look to the history of American imperialism, which renders people in the United States unaware of the profound effects the US has had on the non-Western world. I know this from experience. Whereas people in the Philippines attempt to gain more knowledge of lives beyond them, people in the US think that American citizenship is the best thing that could happen to anyone. 

Look to the biases we hold and whether or not we tailor our interactions with others to affirm these biases. 

It’s important to question the structures in place, it’s vital to question why some experiences are elevated and some are not. When we express our fetishising admiration fo one culture, we erase a part of that culture. We also neglect other cultures, other experiences, and thus the Other people who carry these experiences within them. 

I often question my existence in the eyes of my American peers. 

[madeleine-says]

Inaugural post for this blog

After much deliberation, I decided to start a blog, if you can call this little project that. I would like for this place to be a platform for my numerous thoughts on issues ranging from cultural debate to art analysis to the appreciation of the poetic mundane. I hope that the process of maintaining this little blog would help me find my “voice” and refine my thought process. 

Here’s to the future!