As noted by a friend’s comment in my post on tabo, the tabo’s significance in the life of the Filipinos as well as it’s parallelism with our society was noted over a century ago by no less than our national hero, Dr. Jose Rizal in his novel El Filibusterismo ( The Reign of Greed).
The El Fili, as we fondly call it, was a compulsory reading in High School. However, you know how it is in High School, nobody pays much attention to classic literature, at least not me. The details of the novel eludes me but I can’t forget it’s first two chapters with scenes on the Bapor Tabo (Steamer Tabu). Here are excerpts taken from Filipiana.net. Full text is also available from the website.
She was a heavily built steamer, almost round, like the tabú from which she derived her name, quite dirty in spite of her pretensions to whiteness, majestic and grave from her leisurely motion.Altogether, she was held in great affection in that region, perhaps from her Tagalog name, or from the fact that she bore the characteristic impress of things in the country, representing something like a triumph over progress, a steamer that was not a steamer at all, an organism, stolid, imperfect yet unimpeachable, which, when it wished to pose as being rankly progressive, proudly contented itself with putting on a fresh coat of paint. Indeed, the happy steamer was genuinely Filipino!
Moreover, if the comparison with the Ship of State is not yet complete, note the arrangement of the passengers. On the lower deck appear brown faces and black heads, types of Indians, Chinese, and mestizos, wedged in between bales of merchandise and boxes, while there on the upper deck, beneath an awning that protects them from the sun, are seated in comfortable chairs a few passengers dressed in the fashion of Europeans, friars, and government clerks, each with his puro cigar, and gazing at the landscape apparently without heeding the efforts of the captain and the sailors to overcome the obstacles in the river.
It was more than a century after Rizal wrote these lines, yet Philippine society almost remained unchanged. There is still a wide divide between the rich and the poor and it’s growing wider over the years. Perhaps, the only glaring difference is that the Chinese who used to belong to the lower deck of Bapor Tabo, now belong in the higher stratum of our society. But the Indios or the Filipino masses remain in squalor.
How ironic. Just like the tabo, which we can’t live without, the masses remain as important to the naghaharing uri. But much like the tabo, the masses are as dispensable as the lowly tabo once their service is no longer needed. Poor tabo. Poor Filipino masses.
