№ 823. Kapwa

In one of her classes Katrin came across the concept of kapwa in a paper written by Dr. Virgilio Enriquez, a Filipino psychologist who advocated for an indigenous psychology rooted in the heritage of Asian people. Suddenly, it all made sense to her; the quirks and idiosyncrasies of Pinoy behavior that were so unlike anything she encountered in Germany, from how Filipinos would always offer to share food or squeeze one more person into an overcrowded vehicle. Even the first EDSA revolution, where thousands massed on the streets to peacefully overthrow the government, was to Katrin a manifestation of kapwa on a grand scale. 

....Jamming with the cosmos is a groovy way of saying “Bathala Na.” In her book, Katrin describes Ba(t)hala Na as a mindset of improvisation and not fatalism, as interpreted by the Americans. “In the folds of unforeseeable events hide infinite opportunities,” she writes. “It recognizes that such situations can teach one to adapt and eventually turn unfortunate events into advantages, making defect into effect.” 

 

.... Kapwa, the Self in Other: Worldviews and Lifestyles of Filipino Culture-Bearers is a compendium of academic theory, artistic commentary, journal entries, and deeply personal reflections collected from the combined years of studying Sikolohiyang Pilipino under Dr. Enriquez, walking with culture bearers, and ultimately embodying her object of study: the indigenous philosophy of kapwa. A cosmic culmination of a life’s work, not destroyed, but purified in the fire. 

It is now 20 years since Kapwa was published. In the diaspora, the active practice of kapwa is a thread that weaves Filipinos to their heritage. Before I read Katrin’s book, I only had a cursory understanding of what it meant: a shared identity, which I thought was akin to a brother/sisterhood. It is much more than that. In contrast to the Western individualism of “I” and “you,” kapwa is a relationality where the inner self encompasses the Other. I’m reminded of the Rastafarian term “I and I” which expresses the oneness between all people and the Divine, a worldview that also resists colonial narratives.

“When the Spanish landed in Limasawa, the natives welcomed them. They nurtured them. They gave food. The Spanish were dying of scurvy and starvation. But the Limasawans tended to them,” Tahimik says, explaining that their natural openness overrode whatever suspicions they had of the foreigners. “I think that’s what kapwa is about. This kapwa is part of the high water table of spirituality, which means we treat people as spiritual beings, akin to our spiritual selves.”

Tahimik (although he instructs us to call him Tatay) had just returned from Cebu, where he unveiled more pieces from his world-traveled exhibition Indio-Genius: 500 Taon ng Labanang Kultural (1521-2021) at the Mactan-Cebu International Airport, including a tribute to Lapu Lapu’s wife Bulakna, a babaylan warrior to whom Tahimik gave the poetic license of delivering the fatal blow against Magellan.

Kidlat and Katrin’s respective works are like warp and weft, each reinforcing the other and together weaving an intricate picture of Pagkataong Filipino. Kidlat’s kapa-kapa way of living intrigued his wife. Growing up in post-war Munich, Katrin was intellectually oriented toward phenomenology, analytical psychology, and existentialism, the theoretical frameworks she would eventually use to try and understand her host culture. 

“She was trying to verbalize what it is about this culture that makes it gemütlich or maginhawa. She could feel it. By getting her PhD in Sikolohiyang Pilipino, she was able to come up with very explicit examples. And I benefited from it too,” Tatay says. “She’s very academic, and sometimes the layman finds it difficult to understand the jargon of academics but, as it was playing out in our family and our life with other artists or with other people, the tenets that were brought out by Dr. Ver Enriquez began to be more understandable to me. I could relate to a lot of them, as a filmmaker and an artist.”

In the middle of her book, sandwiched between the chapters on culture bearers, Katrin turns her introspective eye on herself. In her quest to cross the threshold of consciousness and fully imbibe ancestral wisdom, she felt that she needed to go through painful initiation rituals that induced states of trance and healing. She had eight-pointed stars tattooed on the palms of her hands and the shape of a lizard and snake branded onto her skin, among other rites, some of which were self-administered. “Suffering, in ancestral Filipino custom, is never shunned or avoided,” she writes. “Rather it is recognized as a spiritual cleansing process… healing is breaking through a crust of fears.”

This section was surprisingly intense, and I was still trying to process it when Katrin finally admitted visitors to her room. I ask her if it is necessary for her, or for others, to go through that kind of pain. 

“Pain for me was curiosity, because I didn’t believe that tattoos were only about social status, or like today, it’s all just decoration and expression of personal conflict,” she answers. “I believe, and that’s what I wanted to describe, how tattoos are actually a way of healing, to impart the body a sense of healing that it never forgets.” 

De Guia is sitting up on the bed covered by a blanket, with her husband next to her. It’s an intimate moment with Tatay and Nanay that should feel intrusive, but the couple are as receiving and giving as ever, even as Mrs. de Guia struggles with COPD. She continues, “Around the world, tattoos are initiations given around early puberty. So I was curious, and I know that makes many people cringe, but I thought if you want to know anything, you have to be willing to also get hurt sometimes, because nothing is given on a silver platter. You have to earn it.”

Katrin de Guia has always considered herself somewhat of a rebel. Freedom is paramount, as it is to her husband. “I was an oddball in the academe,” she says, “but smart enough to defend my viewpoints, so that’s what I did with Enriquez’ theory, to find a way to show that he was right.” Over the years, she has lectured, organized Kapwa Conferences, and recently she has appeared on YouTube programs sharing her story with a new generation. “If I was a professor, I couldn’t do this. They would say, that’s not scientific.”

She reveals that she has a manuscript nearing completion, which her son Kawayan has been rallying for her to finish. We learn that it’s a sequel.  “Kapwa, the Self in Other means people,” de Guia says, “but Kapwa, the Self in All means the animist self, the self in all, plants and animals and trees, mountains.” A thread of this belief can already be detected running throughout the first book, waiting to be unraveled. “Enriquez could not come out with something like that during his time. He would have been discredited right away, because animism had nothing to do with psychology. Now, 50 years later, it’s different. We forget that we are not the only ones on this planet. So the animist connection is moving into the focus of many people, especially younger people who inherit this planet.”

Her affinity with the natural world and with the unseen was forged as a young child, long before she spent time with indigenous communities. Her family had a small weekend cottage along the lake where she and her brother were given the freedom to roam. One time, she realized she had gone deep in the forest and couldn’t find her way back, a scene straight out of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. “And so I cried and cried and cried, and then I fell asleep on the moss,” she recounts. “And when I woke up, I saw suddenly little sparks of light on the trees, going from one tree to the other, like, here’s the way. So I followed it, and in five minutes, I was out of the forest and I could find my way home. It was an experience I never forgot.”

The husband interjects with how impressed he was when he first met her. “She could walk barefoot, even over stones. Me, I was born in this part of the world but I don’t have the soles for that,” he says. “It shows her connection with nature.”