Present Encounters : Papers from the conference of the Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane, 1996

Mark Justi niani Discussion of the artist's work in the SecondAPT lkot (Round Trip) Good afternoon . I am Mark Orozco Justinian i, a Filipino with a first name taken from the Bible, a middle name that my mother says comes from Mexico, and an Italian surname with a dubious orig i n . My father says an Italian priest came to our country long ago to spread the words . . . 'Go forth and mu ltiply'. But what is most evident is the Chinese blood wh ich runs through my veins and goes straight to my eyes. Nevertheless, I am very much a Fil ipino. I was born in the first year of President Ferdinand Marcos's long reign in the country. I was six years old when Martial Law was declared . I remember a picture of Marcos in some of ou r books: working happily with t he farmers, naked from t he waist up , showing off h is muscles. Like a little brown Charles Atlas wading i n a rice paddy. I remember the curfew which forced everyone home by midn ight, the new society song , and the oath we had to take every morning i n school. With this we swore never to lie to the flag and to the government. There were only two daily newspapers, both government controlled . Television and radio programs were also monitored . At any time programs would be i nterrupted by Martial Law propaganda. I had a few activist relatives, but this meant nothing to me then . In our middle-class household I was enjoying television shows and preferred the English ones because they seemed to look better and classier. I cou ldn't watch Filipino shows for fear of being called bakya or baduy which means 'low class' . We enjoyed the radio with its American Top 40 h its and other hits by sound-alikes from The Philippines. This wasn't new of course : my father loved Sinatra and Elvis. My mother adored Elizabeth Taylor, Audrey Hepburn and Shirley Temple. And we had local versions of all these stars . They looked , moved and sounded very much like t he orig inals. They were mostly light­ skinned mestizos [of Spanish and Philippine background] with native-looking sidekicks and comics. We copied almost anybody who became famous. We Filipi nos are, after all, known as 'the great imitators'. I n school, we were required to speak Engl ish , the med i um of instruction since American colonisation . I t i s a must for every educated Filipino. But this was i n Negros province, where the language of my home and my family is l longgo. Somehow, the pictu re at home never fitted with what was being taught in school . The first few years were accompanied with books by the New Cathedra l Basic Readers Series, printed with ecclesiastical approval in the United States of America. The books were about Father, Mother, John, Jean , Judy, Spot and Puff; the ideal 1 960s American family who ate packaged cereals for breakfast and wore shoes and socks i nside their house. So we learned English the hard way. 'A' is for apple. Even to a middle-class child in the province, the apple was not a common fruit. It was imported and was very expensive. We could have them only du ri ng Christmas time. And to many, the apple remained a concept: forbidden and irresistible. A mere bite and the rest of us were deprived of paradise. I struggled hard to translate my thoughts into English . Sometimes I would slip and out come those shameful l longgo words. The teacher reprimands me, 'Justiniani, speak in English ! ' Students were fi ned ten centavos for every uttered Filipino word . To fil l i n t h e gaps, it is better to just say 'Aaahh . . . ' And hopefully save a little money. By high school, among my peers, everyone was acting like an English teacher, checking on each other's grammar. To this day, it is easier to speak this foreign language to a foreigner than to a fellow Filipino. English is sti l l the yardstick of one's class background and 1 20